VoIP Geeks Rock
Note: This is another one of VoIP Tech Chat’s more technical articles. If you’re not a techie (or a trekkie), you may want to skip this one. In fact, we’d love it if you instead read our What is a VoIP? article instead.
First, let’s discuss CNAM. CNAM is the Calling Name matching a telephone number. So, when you purchase caller ID with name from your telephone service provider, you get a name (or region) sent to your caller id with name enabled phone. Yay. But, if one of the reasons you’re using VoIP is to save money, and / or your telephone provider does not provide this service, then Asterisk and the Internet can help you.
Using the Asterisk dial plan, you can call a script to take the calling party’s number and do a reverse lookup; attempting to match a name to the number. Many websites offer this service for free, including AnyWho, Google, and 411.com.
In a nutshell, the script checks for a name and if it finds one, changes the Caller ID Name data of the call. If it can’t find the name, it will try the next site down the list. If it fails to find any name, it will set the caller id with name data to be the calling party number.
The perl script can be downloaded here, or code viewed online from Team Forrest’s website. There are many, many types of these scripts available online, and using Google, a VoIP enabled geek can find them very quickly. This script does not use the Asterisk::AGI module, mostly because Fred likes to connect directly. Oh, if you want to look, the Team Forrest article shows an example of how to integrate it into Asterisk.
As always, we love to here from you, let us know what you think!
Hey… wouldn’t it have been a good idea to introduce Asterisk and other VoIP systems as well?
Um, yeah… we should have… looks like we’ll start working on some articles.
Patrick and Fred
6 Jan 09 at 10:12 am
anywho , google , whilepages.com ..all these free sites not giving full result.They give only location .and if u want cnam(name of the caller).these free sites will led u to some paid service.I dint find any free cnam providers ..Please let me know if any(please do a search on that websites before replying).
Nikhil
24 Aug 09 at 3:29 am
Depends on the number. If there’s no listing known, they generally will return the city / state (like with most mobile phone numbers). But if there is a record, you’ll get it.
Fred
24 Aug 09 at 6:24 am
this is NOT CNAM….
perhaps it can be called “the poor man’s CNAM”
or “ghetto CNAM” but this is just a reverse directory listing for published numbers, and not an actual CNAM look up…
thought i was going to learn something from this article….
nyphonejacks
7 Feb 10 at 12:54 am