If you are involved in sending bulk SMS through multiple carriers in multiple countries, you’ll want to make sure you follow the different rules and regulations that come up with each carrier and country. For example, when it comes to the sender's ID, some countries might require it in alphabetic form while others might require numeric. Some carriers are not built in a way to support Unicode formats while some filter messages with certain keywords. Not complying with local regulations will lead to the failure of your SMS campaigns as the required text will not be delivered to the recipients.

Phone carrier lookup should be done at least once for each phone number, however, the past records say that 35% of the phone numbers do change the carriers monthly. Keeping in mind your dependency on SMS marketing, a frequent phone carrier look-up will be beneficial in maintaining the effectiveness of the data.

Many businesses choose to ignore the carrier look-up and with time they realize the hard-hit on their wallets. Accepting the necessity of cell phone carrier lookup, here’s everything you need to know about doing a phone carrier lookup.

What is a Wireless Carrier Lookup?

Wireless carrier look-up, in the most general terms, is to know the wireless carrier or network being used to send out text messages to the prospects/customers.

Let’s understand better, when we want a letter to be posted we have two associations – the postman, who will be responsible to take my letter at the mentioned address. Secondly, the person to whom the letter has to be delivered. Now for text messaging through phone, the postman has been replaced with a wireless carrier through which my text will reach my customer.

The customer owns the phone, not the phone number. Through a look-up, we come to know which wireless carrier owns the phone number. Each wireless carrier has a carrier ID number which is determined by a multi-purpose phone validation tool like ClearoutPhone.

Knowing the carrier services demonstrates two things

Do I need to do a carrier lookup?

If you are dependent on SMS marketing, YES!

You must be confused thinking that you have been sending out Sms’s since long but were hardly concerned about the carrier sending it out. This is because sending personal text messages and sending bulk messages as a business company is different.

In business, a lot of texts have to be sent out on a regular basis which is not done through a standard 10-digit phone number. The text messages are often sent out through a short code, toll-free or 10DLC phone number.

When you opt for a 3 rd party software to send bulk SMS messages, such software needs to know the carrier of the phone numbers to which the message has to be sent out.

The facility to port the phone numbers has been available for long which means the original phone-carrier that issued the number may not be accurate. 

If the 3 rd party software has the wrong carrier information it cannot route the message data properly leading to multiple failures.

How can I do a phone carrier look-up with a phone number?

ClearoutPhone, a global phone validator across 240+ countries, provides the facility of knowing the carrier by just entering the phone number. By just entering the phone number you are provided significant details related to the phone number – the validity, location, line-type and carrier.

With such this information you can ensure:

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