By Emma Bradley, Director of Product Management for Bandwidth Insights
If you’re a reseller, your call quality conversation looks a little different than everyone else’s.
Yes, you care about audio quality. Everyone does. But there’s a second conversation happening at the same time: one about cost, routing, and margin. And the two conversations are more connected than they might seem.
Here’s how I think about it.
The reseller reality
In the voice world, carriers generally have obligations to carry calls over their networks. And pricing can change. A carrier can update their rates with relatively short notice. If you’re running tight margins on high call volumes, a sudden price change on a particular destination can seriously affect your profitability if you’re not watching it closely.
So resellers do something called least cost routing, which means actively managing which routes calls take based on cost. When a route becomes too expensive, you may redirect or reject traffic to protect your margins.
It’s the reality of how the market works, impacts how you monitor quality, and which metrics mean the most for your business.
Two types of problems, one set of tools
When I talk to customers about what they want to keep an eye on, it usually comes down to two things: connection and audio quality.
Connection is about whether the call got where it needed to go. Audio quality is about what the experience was like once it did. You can have a call that connects but still sounds terrible. Both matter.
What’s interesting is that for resellers, connection data does double duty. It’s not just telling you about call experience—it’s telling you something about cost.
When you see a spike in certain error codes, that’s not just a technical signal. It’s a financial one. Error patterns can tell you that you’re routing calls through an expensive path, that your configuration isn’t optimized, or that you’re approaching a capacity constraint that’s going to cost you.
Where monitoring comes in
Right now in Bandwidth Insights, you can see your spend by country and monitor your error codes and capacity in real time. That combination gives you meaningful visibility into where your traffic is going and where issues might be developing.
One thing I’d highlight: when resellers see errors on their network, the response is usually different from what I see from enterprise customers. Enterprise customers typically want to find the root cause and fix whatever broke. Resellers are usually asking a different question: how do I change my configuration to address this? That’s not a criticism—it reflects a different operational posture. But it does mean you want to catch those signals early, before you’re reacting.
What we’re building toward
Reports are useful. But they’re inherently reactive—you’re looking at what already happened.
What a lot of our reseller customers have asked for is more direct, real-time visibility into spend. We’re working on that now. The goal is to make it easy to see your spend on a daily basis, or even more frequently, without having to pull down a report after the fact. We’re also working on spend alerting—so you can get notified before a cost issue becomes a cost problem.
We’re targeting that for later this year. In the meantime, capacity and error code data are your best leading indicators for where spend is heading.
What to watch today
If you’re using Bandwidth Insights now, a few things are worth keeping a close eye on:
Capacity utilization. If you’re consistently bumping up against your concurrency limits, that’s a signal your current configuration may not match your actual traffic patterns.
Error code trends. Not every error is created equal. Some are expected—they’re part of how the business works. Others are worth investigating. Tracking error rates over time, not just reacting to spikes, helps you understand what’s normal for your traffic and what isn’t.
Traffic patterns by destination. If certain geographies are generating a disproportionate share of errors or costs, that’s worth knowing before it becomes a budget surprise.
The goal is to give you more control and more advance notice, before problems get expensive.
Emma Bradley is a Director of Product Management for Bandwidth Insights, focused on voice insights and the customer experience within the Bandwidth App.
