Troy, The site seems to have some degree of lead generation and/or marketing features such as entreatments to purchase numbers, and my guess is that is the monetisation strategy. Can't possibly say if it's working. One does not have to query NPAC directly, of course. There are VeriSign and other STP operators that will resell you this service as well, as will numerous folks who offer SIP interfaces to TCAP LNP queries like Broadvox and SourceComm. It is entirely possible they get the dips on relatively good terms from one of those sources compared to what we expect, due to volume. But yes, at the end of the day not going broke is a requirement. I take it as granted that entities like VeriSign and Sourcecomm and Broadvox do quite a lot of short-term caching, TOS be damned. A bigger question for me is how they are able to offer LNP info relatively free and clear to anyone who wants it, even if they are not carriers per se. Neustar NDA requirements are not friendly to such actors and require a lot of paperwork for anyone wanting more or less direct NPAC access. How someone buying dip access from Neustar (at some level) is able to pass it along to third parties without propogating the myriad of NPAC territorial NDAs is a complete mystery to me. -- Alex Balashov - Principal Evariste Systems LLC 1170 Peachtree Street 12th Floor, Suite 1200 Atlanta, GA 30309 Tel: +1-678-954-0670 Fax: +1-404-961-1892 Web: http://www.evaristesys.com/ On Sep 13, 2010, at 4:26 PM, Troy Davis <troy at yort.com> wrote:

On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 11:43 AM, Chris Boyd <cboyd at gizmopartners.com> wrote:

On Sep 13, 2010, at 11:10 AM, Troy Davis wrote:

...

Yeah, it's very NANPA-centric right now. We wanted to pick a set of information we knew would be complete enough to be useful.

How is the carrier information determined? I've tried a few numbers, and the city/state infor was correct, but the carrier information was incorrect. The numbers were reported as the carrier that originally provisioned service, not the current carrier after porting.

Still a pretty useful tool.

The carrier info is all at 1,000 or 10,000 number granularity depending on the allocation size. The reason LNP isn't there is that I don't know of a way to do it without a per-query fee.

Someone else pointed out tnID, which seems to be doing free LNP dips. I'm not sure how they're making enough money from paid reverse lookups to cover the query fee, especially with the restrictions on caching that most (all?) LNP providers have. But it's great if the economics work and it's sustainable.

Anyone with SS7 access want to allow digits to perform and cache free LNP dips? Happy to expose that for free too, with a client rate-limit and your name on the result page as having sponsored it. Assuming there's no restriction on caching, the cached data could be reused for months. Since this isn't meant to be used for routing, being 3-6 months behind would be fine.

Troy _______________________________________________ VoiceOps mailing list VoiceOps at voiceops.org https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/voiceops