Hey gang, I’ve been using OpenCNAM for years with good success and accuracy, and recently talked a friend into getting rid of Vonage for business and setting up a FreePBX distro and sharing my OpenCNAM account. Everything is great except for something he noticed and I never realized. Unless the cell phone subscriber has explicitly set their caller ID (like I have through my Sprint account) , callers from cell phones simply show up as “WIRELESS CALLER”. I always just thought this was the way things were, until he complained that his customers are all showing up as “WIRELESS CALLER” now (he gets lots of calls from Cell Phones) and when he was on Vonage, it always showed their name. He showed me his old CDRs to prove it and so I did some research and tried out a few other CNAM providers and found one that did show the callers name about 50% of the time, and the other times it would just say “Cell Phone”. But Vonage seems to show the callers name virtually every time for all those same numbers. Does anyone know who Vonage uses? Or do you think they have some personal cached database they keep under lock and key?
There are unfortunately many such databases, none with complete authority, perhaps neustar , they claim they are the best authority over cell phone numbers in NANP land and have a certain legacy CACHÉ , you will also have to pay them a little more.