4 Strategies to Overcome Shrinking Revenue in Wholesale Voice Termination

The Revenue Decline

Sluggish growth in wholesale VoIP traffic is the new normal that carriers face, primarily driven by the rise of OTT players. Juniper Research predicts that voice revenue from mobile subscriptions will decline from $230 billion in 2023 to $182 billion by 2028. The real issue isn’t wholesale voice revenues flattening, but that revenue predictability has collapsed.

Recovering revenues in wholesale voice will depend on how quickly carriers move from reactive to intelligent, metrics-driven execution. The blog explores what revenue opportunities legacy models overlook and four effective strategies to correct them.

Why do traditional commercial models miss the mark?

Traditional commercial models in wholesale voice termination were built for stability: predictable volumes, static rate sheets, and quarterly vendor reviews. But today’s environment is volatile, fragmented, and driven by short-term events. What used to be reliable pricing structures now miss some critical signals capable of driving revenue:

Carriers not tapping into micro-surges

Most operators continue to track voice traffic as a slow, linear decline, especially in low-volume or unstable markets. The bird’s-eye view often hides the real activity. Short bursts of enterprise traffic, reroutes triggered by vendor shifts, and premium CLI traffic usually create temporary spikes in volume and yield. These micro-surges often don’t appear in quarterly dashboards, but represent real, billable revenue. Carriers who monitor weekly and improve their routing mix with monetization windows are already converting this volatility into revenue.

Relying on country-level averages

Routing and pricing are still decided on national traffic aggregates. However, operators within the same market move differently. In a market like Tanzania, one operator may show consistent volume growth, while others flatten or decline. Treating them the same creates mispriced routes and missed rerouting opportunities. Precision routing requires a shift from geographic averages to operator–specific performance data. Without that, carriers overpay for underperforming traffic and overlook where the actual revenue is.

Operators don’t commercialize voice quality

Telecom carriers often measure network performance metrics like Answer-Seizure Ratio (ASR) and Answer-Bid Ratio (ABR) to determine route quality issues, routing delivery problems, or unreachable numbers. However, these metrics are gauged mainly for internal diagnostics, not for revenue. Carriers often overlook that voice quality can—and should—be monetized. Enterprises will pay more for SLA-backed voice trunks that guarantee call clarity, especially where customer experience or compliance is at stake. Carriers that reroute in real time and price accordingly capture a new layer of revenue that standard models miss.

4 Strategies to Reclaim Revenue in Wholesale Voice Termination

Even though traffic volume is down, revenue is unpredictable in voice termination, there is still hope. Revenue is still within reach for carriers willing to rethink how they route, measure, and monetize every call event. Here are four strategies to achieve that:

Optimize the long-tail routes using AI-driven LCR

The most significant gains in wholesale voice margins aren’t hidden in high-volume routes. Instead, revenue hides in long-tail routes—low-volume paths that are manually priced, infrequently audited, and often under-optimized. i3Forum reports show that a few routes carry the bulk of global traffic. While thousands of others deliver minimal volume, they accumulate a meaningful revenue share. Such long-tail routes slip below operator visibility.

AI-powered Least Cost Routing (LCR) flips this by benchmarking traffic across all destinations, identifying underperforming vendors, and rerouting the bottom 10-20% of traffic. By applying AI-driven LCR, carriers can recover revenue without changing their product or pricing structure. Smarter, faster decisions alone drive the uplift and become a competitive advantage.

Turn Voice Quality into a Billable Asset

Call quality is one of the most underleveraged assets in wholesale voice. Most operators actively monitor metrics like Mean Opinion Score (MOS) to detect degradation, yet few monetize those insights. A MOS score of 4.0 or higher is widely considered the threshold for toll-quality voice. It signals a route that can be positioned as a premium trunk.

Carriers that route high-value or business-critical traffic through these paths can command a quality-based pricing tier. SLAs tied to MOS performance and real-time routing when threshold dips create technical and commercial guarantees. Voice quality is a differentiator. And for operators who frame it that way, it’s also a new revenue stream. 

Deploy flash-call detection and micro-billing

Flash-calls are becoming the preferred method for verifying transactions or getting OTPs, replacing traditional A2P SMS in many authentication flows. These calls ring the recipient’s phone long enough for the app or server to confirm them, but they are never intended to be answered. Because the call duration is often under two seconds, it bypasses most traditional systems, going completely unmonetized.

Juniper Research estimates operators will lose $1.3 billion in revenue globally between 2023 and 2027. A flash-call firewall eliminates this as it identifies real-time patterns, based on SIP headers, call duration, and origin-destination behavior. It also integrates with billing systems to apply micro-tariffs. For networks with high A2P authentication volume, this is one of the clearest revenue recovery opportunities.

Publish Open Gateway APIs and charge per transaction

Telcos have used network features like SIM-swap detection, number verification, and QoS-on-demand for internal operations. The features are primarily used for fraud detection, diagnostics, or traffic management. These capabilities are powerful but siloed. The GSMA Open Gateway initiative changes these embedded functions into standardized, secured, and externally accessible APIs. Any third party, including banks, fintech, app developers, and government institutions, can pay to use these features.

The model is simple: Each API usage becomes a transaction, much like a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). The potential is far from theoretical. GSMA Intelligence’s H1 2025 State of the Market report states 73 operator groups—covering close to 80% of global mobile subscribers—have adopted Open Gateway. Open Gateway enables telcos to monetize their most trusted asset: network intelligence.

Conclusion

Revenue hides in the fine print of wholesale voice termination. To reclaim them, carriers must analyze operator–level optimization rather than focusing on country-level aggregates. This helps them monetize the untapped opportunities within the surges that occur. With the API-first telecom era, hiding network capabilities will only result in sunk costs; operators should expose, not bury, those capabilities.