Jul 22, 2025
The Last Call for Landline Telephony? Not Yet.
How many landlines are in service in 2025?
How many landlines are in service in 2025?
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.
If you’ve checked out our International Voice Report, you probably noticed that the data carefully distinguishes between retail and wholesale traffic, as well as between wholesale and direct traffic.
What's the difference?
The international voice market's trajectory is an inexorable downward spiral, and “over-the-top” (OTT) communications services are most certainly the main culprit.
For our next episode of TeleGeography Explains the Internet, we look to the sky.
Our guest is Sal Salamone, Managing Editor of Network Computing magazine. Sal joined me to discuss the emerging market for direct-to-device satellite communications.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You already know that Ukrainians are taking to platforms like Twitter, Telegram, and TikTok to share the sights and sounds of Russia’s invasion.
But here’s a new development: in just one month, carriers have clocked a sevenfold increase in international voice traffic to Ukraine.
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