Sorry, I feel dumb for asking, but what does “voice service providers” mean here? Like, Verizon and TMobile etc etc? Can’t be because there aren’t 2,411 cell companies.
My googling kind of indicates these are VoIP providers. But it still seems weird there are this many.
My vague guess is that these many providers have existed primarily to facilitate robocalling - to force the FCC to play wack-a-mole to get rid of them and FCC is now acting on them en masse, which might be more effective. But people who know this stuff might pipe up on the question.
I assume any company offering VoIP services that interact with phone numbers (Direct inward/outward dialing, DID etc) is potentially included. E.g., virtual PBX, Twilio and so on.
Verizon and T-Mobile primarily provide their voice services using cell towers.
But voice services existed before cell phones!
They were delivered over copper cables between phone exchanges and people's homes. Some people and especially businesses still have these 'landlines'.
I would imagine that most customers of the companies on this list use neither landlines nor cell phones to access their voice services. Instead they likely use some sort of IP-based voice protocol like SIP or IAX.
