Comment by rsync | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rsync | Hacker News Reader

I have a shell script named 'lookup' that lets me know (through twilio) the location, mobile carrier, and registered name of a phone number.

I wrote it to quickly identify mobile vs. non-mobile numbers that I might text - also from the command line.

I won't paste the entire script here (mostly authentication and argument parsing) but the meat of it is:

  /usr/local/bin/curl -X GET "https://lookups.twilio.com/v1/PhoneNumbers/$number?Type=carrier&Type=caller-name" -u $accountsid:$authtoken

I use this several times weekly.

EDIT: by "location" I mean their mobile country code - not their actual location which, of course, you cannot get without (ab)using SS7 which is beyond the scope of twilio ...

In countries which have number portability this may not always be right. For example my phone number returns Vodafone, which was the carrier it was originally assigned to 15 years ago, but I've been on other networks for over a decade.

When Finland got number portability some 15 years ago it also got a free look-up service to see the real operator of every number. This was required for price transparency. Calling within your own network can be cheaper than to a competitor and you should be able to know so before making the call.

Not sure how other countries have handled that. The US had the different approach, callee pays for the mobile part.

Have not looked into the issue for a decade...

What does a few lookups a week cost you? Just a few cents per?

According to https://www.twilio.com/lookup 1.5 cents per lookup, would be 1 cent without the carrier information.

Thanks. I've wanted to do this. Didn't know if there was some account overhead or other fees.

Where do they get the names from?

CallerID information. There are a bunch of lookup services available for it: https://www.voip-info.org/cnam/

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