Retail international long distance (ILD) call revenues have slowly withered in recent years. So, too, has ILD’s contribution to overall carrier revenues.
Let's look back a few years.
In 2013, retail international call revenues (revenues that exclude wholesale revenues and termination payments) generated $99 billion. During that year, wireline, broadband, and wireless services, in total, generated $1.4 trillion. Thus, ILD accounted for 7.1% of total revenues in 2013.
According to our recently updated TeleGeography Report and Database, in 2022, ILD accounted for only 3.3% of total carrier revenues.
According to our recently updated TeleGeography Report and Database, in 2022, ILD accounted for only 3.3% of total carrier revenues.
For the mobile market, outgoing ILD revenues as a share of overall wireless revenues had remained relatively static, even increasing from 2010 to 2012. Since then, however, international mobile revenues have followed the same downward trajectory as fixed ILD revenue trends.
In both the fixed and mobile sectors, ILD calls account for a noticeably smaller share of overall carrier revenues than they did a few years ago.
Global Retail Revenues from International Calls
. Source: TeleGeography, © 2023 TeleGeography
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This analysis covers international call traffic, cross-border OTT traffic, wholesale revenues and traffic, traffic volumes of major carriers, and more.
Patrick Christian
Patrick Christian is a Senior Research Manager with TeleGeography. He heads the Cloud and WAN Research Service. He also focuses on African and European markets specializing in international bandwidth markets and internet infrastructure, WAN services, terrestrial and submarine cable systems, and international voice traffic analysis.