Service Objects is proud to introduce our latest addition to the Phone Insight product line: DOTS Phone Validation – International. This service validates, standardizes and offers important details about mobile, landline and VOIP phone numbers for over 250 countries and territories.
Phone Validation International – Overview
The primary purpose of Phone Validation – International is to validate and standardize input phone numbers, enabling users to determine the likelihood of a number being a valid and dialable phone number.
This process begins with the input: since phone numbers across the globe share various lengths, formats, and characteristics, it is essential to have a reliable data point to associate each phone number with a specific area. Without accurate validation, we would merely be guessing, and a phone number could be considered “good” somewhere even if it is not valid in its intended location.
Currently, Phone Validation – International requires either a country input or a country code in the input. Ideally, the country input should follow the ISO 2 or 3 format, but the service can also handle fully spelled out names or variants. In the future, we may expand the functionality to include alternative location inputs such as geo-coordinate Lat/Longs or an IP address. If you believe this functionality would be valuable to your company, please let us know! Formatting the phone numbers according to the standards of their origin country may also prove beneficial as our algorithms continue to improve.
Validation, Standardization and Scoring
Phone Validation – International validates phone numbers against multiple datasets to determine basic syntax and the dial-ability of the number. Here are a few examples of what the service can do:
- “validPhoneLength” indicates that the number is an appropriate length for the given number
- “validNumber” indicates that the number belongs to a known number block of a Provider and should be dialable
- “formatNational,” “formatInternational,” and “formatE164” provides standardized formats for each number. For example, if the input number is ‘8055553489’ from the United States, users can refer to the “formatNational” attribute to obtain the nicely formatted number: ‘(805) 555-3489
However, dialable numbers alone do not guarantee that a number is “good.” Except for numbers that have been identified as ported, we will not necessarily know if an individual number in a known block is good or not, so we provide a score to help users identify any red flags. Factors such as a known service provider or recent porting activity contribute points to the score, while mismatches between the input country and the country code in the number or an excessive number of consecutive zeroes would lower the score. This scoring system is crucial because a number might technically belong to a valid number block but still be considered a bad number.
Carrier, Line Type and Porting information
Dialable numbers will return Carrier information and Line Type. While these values do not guarantee a successful connection to the intended recipient, they provide a good indication of the likelihood of success. The Line Type attribute helps users identify whether they are calling mobile, VOIP, or landline numbers, aiding decision-making for matters such as TCPA or GDPR compliance.
While the service’s primary purpose is to indicate whether a number is dialable based on its association with a known valid number block, a number marked as ported indicates that the given number has recently been active and valid. Any number currently ported to a new provider should be considered valid. The service provides information about the current provider, the previous provider, and, when available, the original provider. These details help identify the current provider, line type, and potential cases where the line type might have changed.
Location Information
Every phone number is associated with a country, but not all numbers are tied to a specific location. Connecting phone numbers to specific regions varies among countries, with some being more successful than others. Phone Validation – International strives to provide as much location information as possible, including geo-coordinates and time zone data, to help users identify the location of a number and make informed decisions regarding call routing and placement. We leverage our mapping tools in the background to determine location information and identify the most accurate latitude, longitude, and time zone data for each number.
All valid phone numbers should return country, ISO2, ISO3, latitude, longitude and time zone information. However, the “latlongMatchLevel” output will help users determine the resolution level of this data. In the best case scenario, we can lock the number down to a Locality (city) or an Admin Area (state) and give a precise indication of time zone and geo-coordinate centroids. In the worst case scenario, we can only tie the number to the country and geo-coordinates would be locked to Country level centroids.
For a country level match on a big country spanning multiple time zones, multiple time zone responses will be returned indicating the possible options. The service will return the most likely time zone response for the given country first based on population (e.g. A phone number with a resolution level of Country in Russia will return several time zones, but the default first result will be Asia/Moscow). Every time zone object includes the human readable designation (“America/Los Angeles”) a UTC offset (“-7”) and a zone abbreviation when known (“PDT”).
Informational Notes and Warnings
Notes are generally more informational, although some of them could be used to indicate a bad number. They give some extra detail we might find about a phone number such as whether it is a toll free number, whether it is ported, is it a google voice or skype number? “IsNANPA” indicates its part of the North American Number Plan (NANPA). We have more data on numbers in the NANPA system, so we include a note indicating that. A note like “MissingCountryCode” indicates that a known country code was not part of the phone number which is only a big deal if a valid country is not also included in the request.
Warnings on the other hand suggest more problematic issues with the given phone number, in some cases making them more questionable and in others flat out indicating they are bad. For example:
- “IsInvalidNumber” is just plain bad.
- “CountryNotFound” means that we could not validate the number because neither a valid country nor country code was submitted.
- “CountryInferred” suggests a minor mismatch often due to something like a NANPA phone number matching to a different island than was given.
- “InputCountryMismatch” means the given country did not match the country code in the phone number.
- “IsReservedNumber” is for numbers like (XXX) 555-XXXX in the US that could not possibly be real.
- “RepeatingSingleDigit,” “SequentialNumber” etc (see developers guide for the full list) indicate patterns in the phone number that would be considered very questionable to be real.
Conclusion
Phone Validation – International as a new service, will continuously evolve and improve. The service is highly customizable, and we will regularly introduce new notes and outputs. If you would like to learn more about the service, please refer to our Developers Guide here or feel free to contact us.
