any way to "ping" a phone number?

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+3 Q:

any way to "ping" a phone number?

We have a customer who wants to go through their CRM database and somehow determine phone numbers which are valid, without actually having someone sit there and try calling them all.

Is there any way to do something akin to a "ping" on a phone number (including landlines)?

+4 A:

You will need to go through a third party. I have used Melissa data for address verification with good success, they also offer phone verification, but I have not used it

http://www.melissadata.com/listservices/resphoneverify.htm

If getting a 100% correct phone number is crucial, I'd look into a service which would actually call the number, give a verification code and make the user confirm that code with the site. It is a PIA from the users perspective, but that is the most complete route you can take. Doing a quick little googling came up with this site, http://www.phoneconfirm.com which seems to do what I mentioned. I am sure there are others though.

If you can't/don't want to go through a third party, I can't imagine writing something like this yourself would be impossible. Scaling it would be the biggest issue.

Bob 2009-05-15 20:26:59

Scaling is just a matter of how many phone lines you can get your hands on, and how many computers you can get to do the dialing. You can probably make about 1 call every 10 seconds (just verify by listening for ring or busy tone). That's 360 calls an hour, or 8640 calls a day. Hook up 10 computers to 10 phone lines, and you could verify 86,000 numbers a day. As a plus if you hang up before they answer, you don't get charged for long distance.

Kibbee 2009-05-15 20:40:23

@Kibbee: I can't imagine an easier way to lose karma.

Michael Petrotta 2009-05-16 00:18:37

@Kibbee - you'll be dialing people all night long?

Nathan Long 2009-06-18 19:21:47

Agreed. This is just a very slow way of deleting every record in your customer database.

jrockway 2010-02-28 10:48:34

+1 A:

could always go with the good ole war dialer

Matthew Whited 2009-05-15 20:33:01

War dialers? Do people still use those? Ahh, memories...

Keithius 2009-05-15 20:47:29

Better question would be do people still have modems :)

Matthew Whited 2009-05-20 02:05:56

I once did something like that. Yeah, for telemarketers. And yeah, it haunts my conscience to this day.

It was based on a module called app_amd.c (Answering Machine Detection) which was a third party add-on for Asterisk and, AFAIK, can be found in their main tree now. With an E1/T1, you can also distinguish between bad numbers, busy, and many other status codes. Look that up, it may help.

JCCyC 2009-05-22 00:09:02

+1 A:

I believe a CTI system using ISDN calling based service can quickly return a status code that the number is either valid/invalid before the destination begins to ring.

One vendor is Katalina systems, their product is called VoiceGuide and they have a dialling out module that may give you what you want. see www.voiceguide.com.

Just export the calling list to the dialler (csv file) and review the call status after processing.

If the list is very large, it may justify purchasing a system to do this. The rate of calling depends upon the number of lines installed/availble. You might require some custom modifications to abort the call after obtaining the status. Katalina should be able to help. I am not sure if VoIP trunks can give you full access to the line status.

andora 2009-05-28 20:48:09

ansaurus

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any way to "ping" a phone number?

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