This may not be possible, but......"dialing" a mobile number
Posted: Wed Mar 11, 2009 1:54 pm
I somewhat doubt this can be done solely with PHP (maybe not at all), but it's bugging me so I want to know for sure. I don't want to place a phone call, exactly, but the first idea below is kind of like that.
My goal is to have a PHP form that will accept a mobile phone number, and return information regarding which carrier (AT&T, Sprint, etc) it belongs to. The options I've thought of are:
1) "Call" the mobile number, and retrieve some sort of bitstream that could maybe be parsed and searched for information. I'm fairly doubtful of this, since I'm not familiar with telephony and I doubt that it can work the same way as sending, for instance, an HTTP request to a server and getting a response.
2) Query some sort of service, like fonefinder, and retrieve the info. Also kinda doubtful about this, since I've found a couple of services like this and they have warnings about not accessing the service through a script.
3) Purchase a database of area codes and prefixes, and their associated carriers (and subscribe to periodic updates), put in MySQL format, and query it with the PHP form. I've Google searched and found commercial databases available with this sort of information, but it's always in a complete software package; a Windows program you install and run on your personal machine. I'd just need one huge SQL table I could put on my webhost. I know such databases exist, I just haven't been able to find any.
Any suggestions?
My goal is to have a PHP form that will accept a mobile phone number, and return information regarding which carrier (AT&T, Sprint, etc) it belongs to. The options I've thought of are:
1) "Call" the mobile number, and retrieve some sort of bitstream that could maybe be parsed and searched for information. I'm fairly doubtful of this, since I'm not familiar with telephony and I doubt that it can work the same way as sending, for instance, an HTTP request to a server and getting a response.
2) Query some sort of service, like fonefinder, and retrieve the info. Also kinda doubtful about this, since I've found a couple of services like this and they have warnings about not accessing the service through a script.
3) Purchase a database of area codes and prefixes, and their associated carriers (and subscribe to periodic updates), put in MySQL format, and query it with the PHP form. I've Google searched and found commercial databases available with this sort of information, but it's always in a complete software package; a Windows program you install and run on your personal machine. I'd just need one huge SQL table I could put on my webhost. I know such databases exist, I just haven't been able to find any.
Any suggestions?