- Comcast Business and Colt Technology Services built API interoperability to streamline network provisioning for enterprise customers
- The program is the new Comcast Business Innovation Lab's first with an international carrier partner
- The deal is a win for network APIs, which have been slow to roll out despite big promises
Comcast Business and Colt Technology Services are linking their ordering systems through standards-based APIs, so an enterprise can qualify sites, get quotes and turn up circuits across both carriers' networks without running separate procurement processes.
"Customers shouldn't see the boundaries between networks or carriers, they should simply get the connectivity they need, wherever they do business," said Mirko Voltolini, VP of technology and innovation at Colt, in a statement by the two companies.
The companies announced the program Tuesday as a project from the new Comcast Business Innovation Lab. Interoperability is built on Lifecycle Service Orchestration (LSO) standards from Mplify, the industry alliance formerly known as MEF.
LSO is a set of APIs that lets two carriers' back-office systems trade address checks, service qualifications, quotes and orders directly. Comcast Business covers North America. Colt covers Europe and Asia, plus the Middle East and Africa. The partnership allows a company with offices on both sides of the Atlantic to buy from one provider and get both networks.
"We'll each start with each other and then we'll expand to other carriers," said Bob Victor, chief product officer of Comcast Business, in an interview with Fierce Network. "Instead of trying to do something at massive scale and bring in tens of carriers, we want to make this work incredibly efficiently and seamlessly, develop the model with the LSO standards, and then make it easy to plug in other carriers."
The deal is a needed win for network APIs, whose boosters have promised just this kind of interoperability without much real-world adoption.
The integration ties Comcast Business's digital orchestration platform, which exposes its network capabilities as programmable services, to Colt's international network. Enterprises get programmatic access across Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Africa.
Colt claims more than 40 countries and 32,000 connected enterprise buildings. Comcast Business built its international reach mainly by acquisition, buying Masergy in 2021 and Nitel in 2025.
Why carrier-to-carrier automation has taken so long
Carrier-to-carrier automation has been slow. Victor said that's because the systems were never built to be called by software, Victor said.
"Many of those legacy systems struggle to support APIs," he said. Comcast Business concluded it could not retire those systems quickly enough, so it is wrapping the systems in APIs instead. "We don't think we can work our way out of all of our legacy systems fast enough or efficiently enough, and so what we're doing internally is building our own APIs into those legacy systems, extracting the data so that we can innovate."
Last year, STL Partners cut its 2030 mobile network API forecast to $31 billion from $34 billion and pushed its $15 billion milestone from 2026 to roughly 2028.
Still, progress is being made. Colt is implementing LSO Sonata APIs with Telekom Deutschland for Carrier Ethernet services, and according to Mplify, address validation and service qualification are tested and validated, quote testing is underway, aiming to be fully operational in early 2027.
What is the Comcast Business Innovation Lab?
Comcast Business launched its Innovation Lab in April as a way to build new services with partners. With Dell Technologies, Comcast Business is selling managed on-premises edge compute. "We had companies come to us and say, look, you're managing our SD-WAN. Can we just put the SD-WAN logic on a server? Do we need specialized hardware?" Victor said. The operational model is familiar. "Managing a server is very, very similar to us to managing a Wi-Fi access point or an SD-WAN box."
With Digital Realty, Comcast Business plugged the data center operator's ServiceFabric into its own fabric, expanding the locations it can reach on net. With Expedient, it added managed infrastructure and disaster recovery for midsize enterprises without building data centers itself.
Where this fits in Comcast Business's enterprise strategy
Victor said Comcast Business is now a $10 billion division that was doing about $200 million when he joined in 2008, grown mostly organically and sharpened by acquisitions, including Contingent Network Services, Masergy and Nitel. It serves 11 of the top 12 U.S. quick-service restaurant chains, he said, companies with a headquarters and thousands of endpoints that look like small business sites.
Comcast Business disclosed a combined neutral host and CBRS private wireless deployment at Smartlink's Annapolis, Maryland, headquarters earlier this month, and faster dedicated internet, WiFi extenders, cellular failover and network-embedded security for small businesses, in November.
Comcast has been on a years-long journey rearchitecting its network: disaggregating its core with DriveNets, running functions in edge data centers and pushing AI into amplifiers and nodes.
Learn more about network APIs
Are telcos doing network APIs all wrong?
Where, oh, where is the network API revenue?
Comcast wants to remake its network in the cloud's image