Voice
Feb 11, 2025

How Do Wholesale Carriers Fit In the Global Traffic Picture?

Broadly speaking, telecom service providers have two ways of connecting traffic to a destination telco.

They can either connect directly with the destination carrier or route traffic to a wholesale carrier that connects to a destination telco.

Although many retail service providers, such as mobile operators, MVNOs, and cable broadband providers, rely heavily on wholesale carriers to transport and terminate their customers’ international calls, wholesale revenues are down 11% from ten years ago.

Let’s take a moment to dive in a bit and see what's going on.
Jan 9, 2025

A Bit Over-The-Top: What Is OTT Traffic?

The international voice market's trajectory is an inexorable downward spiral, and “over-the-top” (OTT) communications services are most certainly the main culprit.
Oct 24, 2024

What to Know About Direct-to-Device Satellite Communications

For our next episode of TeleGeography Explains the Internet, we look to the sky.
Oct 17, 2024

The History of U.S. Telecom Policy (in Under 60 Minutes)

TeleGeography Explains the Internet is back from summer break.

We return a little older, a little wiser, and you can bet that we've done the summer reading. To that end, we're starting this season with a classic TeleGeography Explains deep dive.

The topic? U.S. telecom law! 

Telecom is a regulated industry, and U.S. law holds complexities that impact what happens across the larger ecosystem. I have a lot to learn about telecom policy, so thankfully I'm joined in this explainer by Jeff Long, an attorney in private practice with broad experience in both the data center and telecom industry.

Jan 11, 2024

Ranking the World’s Largest International Voice Carriers

Many retail service providers, such as mobile operators, MVNOs, and cable broadband providers, rely heavily on wholesale carriers to transport and terminate their customers’ international calls.

Wholesale carriers terminated approximately 257 billion minutes of traffic in 2022, down 5% from 2021. Wholesale traffic declined at an average rate of 1% per year over the past ten years, compared to a -2% CAGR for overall traffic. Wholesale carriers terminated nearly three-fourths (72%) of international traffic in 2022, up from 70% the year before.

Traffic to mobile phones in emerging markets has spurred expansion in wholesalers' share of the overall market. In 2022, wholesale carriers terminated over 87% of traffic to Sub-Saharan Africa and South America. In contrast, wholesale carriers terminated only 56% of traffic to Western Europe.

Wholesale revenues have changed only marginally from ten years ago. But let’s take a moment to look under the hood.
Jan 4, 2024

Where Did the Minutes Go?

The year 2014 represents the peak for international voice traffic. International call minutes declined the following year, for the first time since the Great Depression—and it's been downhill ever since.
Dec 13, 2023

Traffic Talk: What's the Difference Between Wholesale, Retail, and Direct?

If you’ve checked out our International Voice Report, you probably noticed that the data carefully distinguishes between retail and wholesale traffic, and between wholesale and direct traffic.

What's the difference?
Mar 21, 2023

When Carriers Collaborate

Wanna look at some cool voice data?

The recent expansion of the i3forum's Insights tool has quite a bit of that. I've been itching to talk about it on TeleGeography Explains the Internet. So today we're chatting with the i3forum, a nonprofit industry body focused on "accelerating transformation across the carrier ecosystem."

Put another way: this consortium of carriers routinely collaborates on solving some of the biggest challenges facing their industry. And they have a really innovative way of sharing data among participants, to the benefit of all involved. (Non-members can participate in this data-sharing, too. More of that in our discussion.)
Feb 20, 2023

How Did Retail International Call Revenues Fare in 2022?

Retail international long distance (ILD) call revenues have slowly withered in recent years. So, too, has ILD’s contribution to overall carrier revenues.
Feb 7, 2023

The Death of Voice Has Been Greatly Exaggerated

Why has it taken us this long to welcome Senior Research Manager Paul Brodsky—an A+ podcast guest—to TeleGeography Explains the Internet?

I brought Paul on to discuss our most recent voice report, but we couldn’t help getting into a whole lot more. 

 

Copyright © 2025 TeleGeography.