While the big headlines and news sites are running away from Network API (except TelecomTV who did a great summit this week) - quietly the boring, but hard work to make the #API’s productive is happening. This week headlines - from UK operators BT Group & Virgin Media O2 finally announcing to launch number verify V2, to Canada and France getting Aduna Global coverage. All of this is get the "boring" fraud to work - but in the mean time building the foundation for the more exciting KYC, QoS/QoD APIs
Machines are ruling the web now
I got a lot of pushback on my post about agents changing the traffic mix. Fair. The big open question: where will the agent run - on the device, or in the cloud? That decides the traffic pattern. I'm still kicking my thinking around.
My instinct - history says local wins where it can. Look at gaming. Cloud gaming makes sense in theory, but the business model won: you already paid for the phone's compute upfront, so it gets used. Same logic for agents. Anything that doesn't need the latest NVIDIA and can run on a small model on-device, will run on-device. What share of agent tasks that covers, I honestly don't know yet.
But whichever way that split lands, agent behaviour is already reshaping traffic - and business models. Bots are now 57.5% of HTML traffic on Cloudflare 's network - humans are the minority (Cloudflare Radar, 2026). As discussed in last newsletter - AI traffic on Fastly grew ~30% between January and May, 6.5x faster than human traffic (Fastly, 9 June 2026). And the stat that gets me: 51% of AI requests go all the way to origin servers, versus under 9% of human requests. Agents don't cache. They fetch.
And they don't give much back. ClaudeBot crawls roughly 24,000 pages for every visit it refers. Perplexity ~111. Old-fashioned Google search: about 5 (Cloudflare Radar). Caveat: app traffic often arrives without referrer headers, so these ratios overstate it - but the direction is not in doubt.
Publishers will need to react. And they're learning what telcos learned twice: traffic over your infrastructure is not the same as value in your pocket.
Two questions I'd love your view on:
If agents become the traffic, who pays for the infrastructure? Pay-per-crawl? An agent tier?
Does the local vs cloud split actually change the economics — or just who feels the pain first?
The News
Bouygues Telecom joins Aduna - the French coverage map is nearly complete. (Light Reading) https://www.lightreading.com/security/eurobites-bouygues-joins-ericsson-s-aduna-api-gang
Boring but deep: good write-up on how Vonage + Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cognito cut SMS OTP fraud. (AWS Architecture Blog) https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/reducing-sms-otp-fraud-with-vonage-network-powered-solutions-and-amazon-cognito/
TelecomTV's Network APIs & Agents Summit — everything this newsletter cares about, in one place. Where was my invite? https://www.telecomtv.com/content/network-apis-summit/
Friend of the newsletter Leonard Lee asks whether telcos are doing network APIs all wrong. (Fierce Network) https://www.fierce-network.com/wireless/are-telcos-doing-network-apis-all-wrong