Phone Object:FAQ

What are the different phone types that Phone Object can identify?

Answer

Phone numbers that verify at the 7-digit level can be identified as follows:

• Cell
• LandLine
• Voice Over IP

Additionaly, if a Phone Number is verified at the 10-digit level, it can also identify the phone number as follows:

• Residential
• Business
• Small Office / Home Office

How does Phone Object verify whether a number is a cell phone or landline?

Answer

We identify cell phones solely by line range using LERG data. The LERG (or Local Exchange Routing Guide) contains information on how to connect calls through the North American telephone switching network. Part of the LERG data is advisory information from the various telephone companies. It relates to how the Telco who owns that line range is currently using those numbers, including whether or not they are using them for provisioning new cell phones.

We rely on this information to tag phone numbers as cell phones. This is a good, but not foolproof method for tagging numbers as cell phones. Due to things like local number porting, individual phone numbers may differ in usage from the other phones in their line range. For example, a phone number that is in a range currently being provisioned to land lines may have been ported over to a cell phone.

Why Phone Object returning a landline number as valid, in actual that number is disconnected?

Answer

Phone Object is using data that has aged 6 months. With 6 months of aging, you can expect on average 10% to 15% of the records to have either been disconnected or have some material change in ownership or service address.

If you need the most current data, it is available on the Telco Smart Search Web Service. The “currently connected” percentage for Telco Data is very near 100%.

“Is it useful for disconnect filtering” depends on the business case. If a number is in the Phone Object (loaded with freshly built data) there is an 85% to 90% chance that the number is still connected. If that threshold is useful for the business case then “yes”. This is useful for someone who has a larger collection of leads than they can pursue and may need to reduce the amount of leads so they can focus on higher percentage records.