How wholesale voice pricing actually works
What really drives a wholesale per-minute rate, why jurisdiction changes the number, and what to check on any rate deck before you sign it.
What drives a wholesale rate
Four things move a wholesale per-minute rate: jurisdiction, since interstate, intrastate and local traffic each rate differently; the destination NPA-NXX, because rural and high-cost exchanges carry their own charges; your committed monthly volume; and your peak calls per second. Any provider quoting one blended number for all US traffic is averaging across those four, which is fine until your mix shifts. Ask for the deck, not the headline rate.
| Dimension | Retail SIP trunking | Wholesale SIP trunking | Why it matters |
|---|
| Pricing basis | Published list rate per minute | Volume-tiered rate deck | Your rate moves with commitment, not a public page |
| Rating | Usually one blended US rate | Interstate, intrastate and local rated separately | A shift in call mix changes your cost per minute |
| Capacity | Fixed calls-per-second ceiling | CPS sized to burst and raised on request | Campaigns fail at the ceiling, not at the average |
| Commitment | No term, no minimum | Committed monthly volume or spend | Ask what happens in a month you miss the commit |
| Support | Portal and ticket queue | Direct network operations and a shared Slack channel | Route issues need an engineer, not a first-line script |
Also worth checking before signing: whether billing increments are per second or rounded to six seconds or a full minute, since rounding on short calls can outweigh a lower headline rate; whether carrier and regulatory fees are passed through at cost or marked up; whether the deck is rerated when your volume grows or only at renewal; and what the shortfall terms are if you miss a commit. Signalmash bills per minute with no channel packs and no setup fee, and publishes its retail list rates openly, which is the ceiling a wholesale deck prices below.
Interstate, intrastate and why jurisdiction matters
| Jurisdiction | Interstate | Intrastate | Local / intraLATA |
|---|
| Definition | The call crosses a state line | The call stays inside one state | The call stays inside the local calling area |
| Who sets the rules | The FCC | The state utility commission | State commission and local tariffs |
| How it is rated | Usually the headline rate quoted on a deck | Rated separately, and varies widely state by state | Often folded in with intrastate on a deck |
| Cost pressure | Generally the lowest of the three | Historically higher, though federal intercarrier compensation reform has narrowed much of the gap | Rural and high-cost exchanges sit here |
| Why it matters | A deck quoting interstate alone tells you very little about your bill | Your state mix can move blended cost materially month to month | High-cost exchanges can carry charges of their own |
| What to ask | Is this rate jurisdictionally rated or blended across all US traffic? | Which states are surcharged, excluded or priced off-deck? | How are high-cost and rural NPA-NXX billed? |
Committed volume, CPS and minimums
Wholesale decks are priced against a commitment. The commitment can be monthly minutes, monthly spend, or a floor per jurisdiction, and the tier you land in sets the rate for everything above it. What matters is how the commitment behaves when you miss it: some carriers rerate the whole month at the next tier up, others bill the shortfall, and a few simply hold the rate. Ask which of the three applies before you sign, because it is the difference between a bad month and a bad quarter.
Calls per second is the other half of a wholesale commitment and the one most often under-specified. A predictive dialer running 200 agents can open several hundred call attempts a second at the top of a campaign even though its concurrent-call count is modest, and a CPS ceiling set to average load will fail exactly when the campaign starts. Size CPS to the burst, not the mean, and confirm what happens when you exceed it: a ceiling that returns 503s is very different from one that queues.
Sizing a wholesale trunk
Size to peak concurrent calls and peak calls per second, not to seats or to subscriber count. Each G.711 call needs roughly 87 to 100 kbps in each direction including packet overhead, so 100 concurrent calls is about 10 Mbps symmetric at the edge; G.729 cuts that to roughly a third at some cost to audio quality. On the interconnect side, plan for the busiest hour of your busiest day rather than a monthly average, and leave headroom for the traffic you are about to win rather than the traffic you have.
What you need to go live
- A SIP-capable phone system or SBC. 3CX, FreePBX, Asterisk, Cisco, Avaya, Genesys, Five9, Microsoft Teams Direct Routing and most others connect to a Signalmash trunk by IP authentication or SIP credentials.
- A static public IP or registration credentials for the trunk, and the codecs your system prefers (G.711 by default).
- Numbers. Buy new local or toll-free numbers in the portal, or port the ones you have with a letter of authorisation and a recent invoice; local ports typically take one to two weeks, toll-free two to four.
- E911 addresses for every number that can dial out, and CNAM registered so your business name shows on outbound calls.
- A test plan. Run a trial trunk alongside your current carrier, cut outbound over first, then port inbound. Our voice engineers sit in a shared Slack channel for the cut-over.
Deeper reading: what SIP trunking is, the best providers in 2026, wholesale SIP for resellers, Twilio Elastic SIP alternatives and the telecom glossary for any term above.
.webp)
.webp)
