Wholesale glossary
A2P (application-to-person) messaging is traffic initiated by software: OTPs, alerts, marketing. P2P (person-to-person) is human conversation. They are priced completely differently: A2P carries commercial rates, P2P rides subscription and interconnect economics. That price gap is the entire business case of grey routes, SMS pumping and bypass fraud.
Why it matters
Misclassification is the root disease: when A2P traffic masquerades as P2P, the sender thinks it paid for premium delivery while riding a P2P path with no guarantees. Every messaging fraud is, at heart, a lie about which of these two types the traffic is.
What practitioners watch
Classification signals: sender ID patterns, throughput no human produces, message structure (OTP formats), destination concentration and time-of-day distributions. Firewalls and observatories exist to enforce this boundary at carrier level.
Related: Grey Route · SMS Firewall · SMS Pumping