Is there a way to determine a callers location by using the phone number or any other way?
His “apparent” location? Yes.
His “real” location? Not a chance.
Between number portability, Caller ID spoofing, and IP redirection, expect to have no fun.
What do you mean by “apparent” and a ‘real’ location. How big is a difference between those two?
I mean say a person from Hawaii has his freebpx with asterisk setup anywhere, and the person uses one of the sip trunk providers and buys a number from Florida.
Say you have that same setup for your number with freepbx/asterisk, and you and your server are in the NYC or doesn’t matter where. When person from Hawaii calls your number in New York, you’ll probably know that the number is from Florida, is there a way to find out that person is actually connecting from Hawaii to his server?
I think what Dave is saying is that it is so easy to spoof callerID there is no way of really knowing where the call originated gong by just the Phone Number,
So most likely no…especially if they are using cellular or analog lines. If you have the actual IP of the caller than possibly.
The term “apparent” means that there will be a location associated with the call. Thanks for area codes and prefixes, you can get a sense of where the person is, but because it is SO easy to get a phone number for a location that isn’t anywhere near where the caller actually is.
For an easy example, if you have a Sat Phone, your country code is ‘1’ (USA) and your Area Code is ‘321’ (Cape Canaveral Florida).
If you do actually HAVE a sat phone, the last place you’d actually be when you used it was Florida, but your “apparent” location would be at the Cape.
VOIP providers do the same - I can get a phone number in almost any country or any state in the US. I’ll never be any of those places, but I’ll have a phone number there.
I can also “clone” a caller ID - telemarketers do it all the time. They use random Caller IDs to avoid people catching on that a bill collector or junk dealer is calling.