TELECOM Digest OnLine - Sorted: Re: Advice Needed on SMS Servers

Re: Advice Needed on SMS Servers

John Levine (johnl@iecc.com)
30 Oct 2004 21:34:56 -0000

> Rather than have the user select their carrier when enabling sms
> messaging, we were hoping to find a web site or web service that will
> list a user's carrier given their cell phone number. Do you know if
> such a site exists? Or perhaps there's a better method of handling
> this that you can suggest.

Unless you have access to the number portability database, you can't
tell.

It's easy enough to go to nanpa.com and find out what carrier each
prefix is assigned to, but now that people can move from carrier to
carrier and keep the phone number, the prefix info is only a guess.

If you really can't afford your own SMS gateway, you might take a look
at clickatell.com or zimepl.net which offer SMS gateway service priced
per message via their servers.

By the way, if I SMS a name and partial address or zip code to
shortcode 46645 on any US network, Google will look up the phone
number and SMS it back for free. Is that similar to what you plan?

John R. Levine, IECC, POB 727, Trumansburg NY 14886 +1 607 330 5711
johnl@iecc.com, Mayor, http://johnlevine.com,
Member, Provisional board, Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail

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