Setting up wholesale DIDs across 50 countries
What changes when you move from a single number-provider account to a multi-country wholesale setup - and the boring rules every regulator cares about.
By Codus Nullus
When the platform first wired up phone numbers in three countries, things worked because three retail accounts are easy to track in a spreadsheet. By country thirteen, the spreadsheet had quietly turned into a liability: porting deadlines slipped, regulatory address proofs were stuck on somebody’s desktop, and at least one number quietly auto-renewed at retail prices because nobody had set the right reminder.
This post walks through the wholesale migration our team ran after that and the patterns that survived contact with reality.
The three things every regulator asks for
Every country with mature telephony regulation - which is most of Europe - asks for some variation of the same three things before issuing or porting a number:
- A registered legal entity in (or recognised by) the country.
- A physical address tied to that entity.
- Identity proof for the responsible person.
A wholesale relationship lets the team answer those questions once per carrier, not once per number. Customers inherit the underlying registration; their numbers route through our entity, and they avoid the part where every new country starts with a stack of PDFs.
Porting timelines worth planning around
| Country | Typical port window | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Lithuania | 3-5 working days | RRT-managed; clean source data is the whole game |
| Germany | 7-15 working days | Source carrier must explicitly release the number first |
| United Kingdom | 5-10 working days | LOA plus proof of address required per individual number |
These are typical windows, not guarantees. Anyone building a customer-facing UI around them should plan for the worst-case window per country, then frame faster outcomes as a pleasant surprise rather than a broken promise.
What we run today
A single API endpoint behind api.c0.lt exposes the catalogue, with country, type, and capability filters. The PBX team consumes the same endpoint resellers do, so when a port stalls, there is one bill, one source of truth, and one team to call - not a chain of three vendors blaming each other.