Good evening, I’m thinking of starting a small company with my own funding, which will work like TrapCall and ShowMeTheNumber, and I would like to use Asterisk to do so.
I need your help and experience in terms of the hardware required but also providers that include the ANI so that the calls can be “unmasked” so to speak. There are so limited resources about that. I’ve recently tested both of the mentioned solutions and I think I have a plan in my mind that would cover the “missing parts” of each of them.
So, based in your experience, what hardware requirements should I meet and which providers offer ANI (or any other “unmask” option that I’m not aware of)?
I’ve contacted several providers, anveo included, and all of them replied that they don’t offer such a service (even for toll-free DIDs). In the other hand, there are at least two services that work as advertised, so I think there are some providers that do offer it, indeed.
I think all operators will release it if you are another network operator. None should do so to an ordinary user.
I’d question the legality of doing this in the UK or EU, even though at least one operator seems to be doing it. In particular, I don’t see how the service can distinguish between an individual person calling and a business calling, and it would therefore seem to conflict with GDPR. The people offering this may well be off shore.
I haven’t looked at the claimed patent, but I imagine this requires the phone “line” to be set to forward on no answer.
I’m not aware of SIP having any standard facility for ANI, so I imagine this would have to be done directly with ISDN.
One other question? How is your service provider going to make money from this? If it is being done as forward on no answer, the unmasking service user is going to have to pay any charges for the call. If the call is not answered, there will be no charging and it would appear that the provider would be providing a service for you with no benefit for themselves.
Thank you for your time on this. The call should be rejected and diverted to the PBX, which in turn will pick the call up. The way “showmethenumber” works.