Wholesale Market
Telecoms carriers can obtain traffic to make up a shortfall, or send traffic on other routes, by trading with other carriers in the wholesale or carrier-to-carrier market. A carrier needs a point of presence where they can interconnect with other carriers, usually in a carrier hotel such as 60 Hudson Street in New York or Telehouse in London by using a fiber ring to link their switches. This is an easy way of doing business, but it does mean that the other carriers in the market have partial visibility of what each other is doing.
Minutes exchanges allow carriers to buy and sell termination anonymously at a contracted price and quality. The anonymity is important, as minutes exchanges are used daily by PTT's and Tier One carriers to manage their commitment deals.
Prices in the wholesale market are far lower than consumer prices but can and do change on a daily or weekly basis. A carrier will have a least cost routing function to manage its trading on the wholesale market. The quality of routes in the wholesale market can also vary, as the traffic may be going on a grey route.
Read more about this topic: International Telecommunications Routes
Famous quotes containing the words wholesale and/or market:
“There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“When General Motors has to go to the bathroom ten times a day, the whole country’s ready to let go. You heard of that market crash in ‘29? I predicted that.... I was nursing a director of General Motors. Kidney ailment, they said; nerves, I said. Then I asked myself, “What’s General Motors got to be nervous about?” “Overproduction,” I says. “Collapse.””
—John Michael Hayes (b. 1919)