Wholesale glossary
An interconnect is the commercial and technical agreement that lets two networks exchange traffic directly, without intermediaries. Direct interconnects mean better rates, better quality through fewer hops, and cleaner fault isolation when something breaks. The count of direct interconnects is a wholesale carrier’s core asset statement.
Why it matters
Every fraud story and every quality story in wholesale is a story about what happens between interconnects. Fewer hops means fewer places for refiling, bypass and blame.
What practitioners watch
When evaluating a carrier, ask for direct interconnect counts in the destinations you actually buy, not a global total, and ask which of your target corridors are direct versus transited.
Related: Global Coverage · Managed Interconnection · CLI