What are Products, Tenants, Subscribers, and Consents?

To better understand the Mobility Services platform, it is important to understand the concepts of Products, Tenants, Subscribers, and Consents.

What is a Tenant?

Mobile Network Operators (MNOs), Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs), Mobile Virtual Network Enablers (MVNEs), and Private Network Operators (PNOs) all use Mobility Services' core network. One thing that all of these operator types have in common is what we call them a tenant on our core.

For a MNO or MVNO, they would have one tenant on our core, typically named after the company. For a MVNE or PNO, on the other hand, they would have one tenant for each of their customers, typically named after their customer.

What is a Product?

A product is something you create at developer.mobility.cisco.com. It is a way to identify your application, and to get access to the APIs you need. A product can be a mobile app, a web app, a business support system (BSS), etc.

What is a Product that can list other Products?

With the scope for listing products for a tenant (products.list_for_tenant:read), you can list all products that have been made available to, and have been enabled by, a specific tenant. See Listing products for a tenant.

So in this case you have a product that is listing other products. Examples of use cases for this is a storefront/marketplace, which is then a product itself on the Mobility Services platform, listing other Mobility Services products.

What Is A Subscriber?

A subscriber is a entity that has a SIM card from a tenant.

A consent is what a product needs to get from a tenant to do something on their behalf, e.g. to send an SMS to a subscriber. A consent is a way for a tenant to control what a product can do on their behalf.

Some consents are revocable by a product and some are not. An example of a revocable consent is one that is itself created by a product. This enables a marketplace application to add and remove products, or rather, product consents.

The tenant is always in control of their consents, and may revoke them if they want to. So if a tenant wishes to remove a product consent for one or several of its subscribers, for example, they may do so.