Crossposted from https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/48779421
I’m writing a program that can find info about a phone number. One problem appears to be that Google’s phone number library doesn’t provide enough info. For instance, take this number: +1 (613) 745-1576. My iPhone correctly says “Ottawa, Ontario, Canada”, while Google’s library doesn’t return the city? How does my iPhone pick this up but not Google’s own library? Is this provided by cell carriers? Is it something with the 745 block? If so, where can I find this info?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_codes_613,_343,_and_753
The city info is there in the 613 block, so Google just ignores it.
I think that relying upon a closed source source of data is perhaps not the right way to go about this. Assuming that they are a source of truth to begin with is problematic.
The area code. In this case 613. There’s enough of them to correlate with a single area.
What I don’t understand is the fact that 613 is Eastern Ontario? How did my iPhone pick up “Ottawa”?
When the phone number is registered to a business in for example google maps it will use that information i think.
The number linked is a government number.
I’m not familiar with Canada’s geography id Ottawa the main city in Eastern Ontario? If so it’s just a difference in phrasing.
My iPhone correctly says “Ottawa, Ontario, Canada”, while Google’s library doesn’t return the city?
There was a time when a phone number’s area code and exchange would indicate a pretty constrained geographic area – for a land-line. I don’t think it’s possible to do this kind of “find the geography from a phone number alone” lookup accurately in the modern environment. Whatever API Apple provided got your example number right, sure. But how will you know when it gets one wrong? How can you know how often it gets it wrong? What does it really mean to assign a place to a cell number?
My own phone number consistently gets pegged by these things as “belonging to” a specific town several miles away from where I live, probably because the exchange part of my number is one that used to be associated with that town. But that observation doesn’t produce any kind of useful information today, it’s just misleading.
