What's the Difference Between Wholesale, Retail, & Direct Traffic?

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?

Retail traffic reflects the total call volumes generated by end users, irrespective of how their service provider routes the call to its destination. All international traffic originates as retail traffic.

Wholesale traffic is traffic routed to its destination via one or more intermediary carriers.

Direct traffic is international traffic that a carrier transports over its own network, and terminates directly with the destination service provider. Direct traffic (also called “bilateral” traffic) requires the carrier to have a direct business relationship with the destination service provider and for the two service providers’ networks to be interconnected.

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 10 years ago.

International Voice Trends

Now that you've sorted out your traffic types, you can appreciate some of the top trends in the international voice space.

• International voice traffic peaked in 2014 and has since declined significantly. ​
• Traffic fell by 6.2% in 2019, 7.2% in 2020, 6.1% in 2021, 5.8% in 2022, and 7.8% in 2023. ​
• A short-term increase in call volumes occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic but returned to a downward trend. ​

OTT Effect ​

• The rise of mobile social media applications has replaced traditional international calling.
• In 2024, WhatsApp had 2.5 billion users, and Facebook Messenger had 1.3 billion. ​
• OTT traffic surpassed international carrier traffic in 2016, with projections of 1.3 trillion minutes in 2024 compared to 305 billion minutes for carriers. ​

International Wholesale Services

• Wholesale carriers terminated approximately 236 billion minutes of traffic in 2023, down 8% from 2022. ​
• Wholesale traffic has declined at an average rate of 1% per year over the past decade. ​
• In 2022, wholesale carriers terminated over 87% of traffic to South America, but only 56% to Western Europe. ​

Prices & Revenues

• Retail international call revenues fell from $96 billion in 2014 to 3.1% of total carrier revenues in 2023.
• ILD calls accounted for 7.1% of total carrier revenues in 2014, down from 3.1% in 2023.
• International mobile revenues have followed a downward trend similar to fixed ILD revenue trends. ​

You might like our explainers on:

• Traffic vs. Bandwidth
• The World Wide Web vs. the Internet 
• Lit Capacity vs. Potential Capacity
• IP VPN, DIA, and EVPN