Wholesale glossary
A grey route carries application-to-person (A2P) messaging over channels priced and provisioned for person-to-person (P2P) traffic. The message still arrives, usually within seconds, but the delivery path misrepresents what it is, converting commercial A2P revenue into near-free P2P settlement. It is arbitrage of a price gap: legal in origin, grey in delivery.
Why it matters
It taxes every sender that does not audit delivery paths: brands pay A2P rates for P2P-grade reliability, with no sender verification and no meaningful delivery analytics on the path that actually carried their traffic.
What practitioners watch
The signatures: P2P channels moving A2P volume patterns, throughput no human produces, sender ID inconsistency across corridors, and a corridor P2P/A2P ratio that drifts upward month after month. Grey routes grow, because arbitrage scales.
Related: A2P SMS Bypass Observatory · SMS Wholesale · SIM Box Fraud