How to Find Phone Carrier in JavaScript

Integrating phone carrier lookup functionality in apps is pretty common. It provides precise information about the phone carrier associated with a phone number. Businesses find phone carrier information for various purposes, such as targeted marketing, enhancing user satisfaction, preventing fraud, identity verification and enhancing security measures. 

If you are a developer working to integrate phone carrier lookup functionality in your JavaScript app, this guide is for you. There are multiple ways to find carrier by phone number. In this guide, we’ll show you various ways to find phone carrier information in JavaScript. You can choose the approach suitable for your project depending on your requirements, such as whether you want the application to be simple or sophisticated. 

What is a Phone Carrier?

A phone carrier is a company that provides mobile telecommunications services to customers. This company is mostly responsible for maintaining its infrastructure to ensure mobile devices can communicate with each other, for example, with cellular towers. Most phone carrier service providers offer voice, SMS messages, and data connection services. Examples of popular phone carrier companies include Verizon and AT&T.

What do I need to Find Phone Carrier Information in JavaScript?

Here are the key requirements for integrating carrier lookup functionality in JavaScript:

Basic Understanding of JavaScript

Although we’ll provide the coding examples and walk you through the required process, having a basic understanding of JavaScript is helpful. For instance, you can customize the code according to your project’s requirements. 

Node.js Environment

To execute the JavaScript code on the server side, you’ll need to download node.js, a JavaScript runtime environment. You’ll also need to install ‘Express’ and ‘Axios’ libraries to handle HTTP requests and responses efficiently and effectively.

Numverify Carrier Lookup API Key

As we mentioned earlier, we’ll show you various approaches to finding carrier lookup information. Two of these approaches involve using a carrier lookup API. APIs act as a ready-to-use solution to get phone carrier information. APIs, in general, are software intermediaries. They allow users to interact with external systems or databases and programmatically get whatever information they need. 

In the context of phone carrier lookup, APIs specifically designed for this purpose offer a straightforward way to get carrier details based on phone numbers. You just need to integrate the API into your code/call the API, and the API will return the carrier information.

We’ll use the numverify API for this guide. Numverify is a RESTful global phone number validation and lookup API. We’ve selected numverify for various reasons:

• Numverify is widely known for its high accuracy. The API is backed by trustable data sources. Thus, it’s a reliable carrier lookup tool to find phone carrier details.
• The API supports phone number validation, carrier detection and line type detection. 
• It returns real-time responses. This means you always get the latest carrier details for the phone numbers you provide.
• Numverify offers global coverage and supports both local and international phone numbers. Thus, it’s perfectly suitable for projects with diverse user bases. 
• Integrating the Numverify API into your JavaScript projects is quick and easy. 
• The API comes with detailed documentation providing clear usage instructions and code examples in various programming languages. 
• Numverify is a free carrier lookup tool. It allows you to perform phone number lookup for free for up to 1000 times a month.
• The JSON API supports 232 countries across the world.

Note: You need to sign up and get the numverify API key to implement the code examples provided in this guide or to use numverify in any app/code.

How to Find Phone Carrier in JavaScript?

Using Node.js

With Node.js, you can create a server-side application that interacts with the NumVerify API to retrieve/find phone carrier information. This approach is suitable for scenarios where you want to:

• Keep sensitive information (such as API keys) secure on the server side
• Handle complex data processing and database interactions
• Enforce security measures
• Control access to external APIs

Here is how you can find carrier details in JavaScript using node.js and numverify:

// server.js

const express = require('express');
const axios = require('axios');

const app = express();
const port = 3000;

app.use(express.json());

app.get('/getCarrierInfo', async (req, res) => {
  const { phoneNumber } = req.query;
  const accessKey = 'YOUR_NUMVERIFY_ACCESS_KEY';
  const url = `http://apilayer.net/api/validate?access_key=${accessKey}&number=${phoneNumber}&country_code=&format=1`;

  try {
    const response = await axios.get(url);
    const data = response.data;

    if (data.carrier) {
      res.send(data.carrier);
    } else {
      res.status(404).send("Carrier information not available");
    }
  } catch (error) {
    console.error('Error retrieving phone carrier:', error);
    res.status(500).send("Error retrieving carrier information");
  }
});

app.listen(port, () => {
  console.log(`Server listening at http://localhost:${port}`);
});

You can then use client-side JavaScript to interact with your server and display the retrieved information to users.

Directly from the Web Browser (Client-Side)

Here is an example of how to find phone carrier information directly from the web browser using JavaScript:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
<title>Phone Carrier Information</title>
<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/axios/dist/axios.min.js"></script>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Phone Carrier Information</h1>
<form id="phoneCarrierForm">
  <label for="phoneNumber">Enter Phone Number:</label>
  <input type="text" id="phoneNumber" name="phoneNumber" required>
  <button type="submit">Retrieve Carrier Info</button>
</form>
<div id="carrierInfo"></div>

<script>
document.getElementById('phoneCarrierForm').addEventListener('submit', function(event) {
  event.preventDefault();
  const phoneNumber = document.getElementById('phoneNumber').value;
  getPhoneCarrier(phoneNumber);
});

async function getPhoneCarrier(phoneNumber) {
  const accessKey = 'YOUR_NUMVERIFY_ACCESS_KEY';
  const url = `http://apilayer.net/api/validate?access_key=${accessKey}&number=${phoneNumber}&country_code=&format=1`;

  try {
    const response = await axios.get(url);
    const data = response.data;

    if (data.carrier) {
      document.getElementById('carrierInfo').innerText = `Phone carrier: ${data.carrier}`;
    } else {
      document.getElementById('carrierInfo').innerText = "Carrier information not available";
    }
  } catch (error) {
    console.error('Error retrieving phone carrier:', error);
    document.getElementById('carrierInfo').innerText = "Error retrieving carrier information";
  }
}
</script>
</body>
</html>

This HTML file includes a form where users can input a phone number. When the form is submitted, it triggers an event listener that calls the ‘getPhoneCarrier’ function to retrieve the carrier information using the NumVerify API. The retrieved information is then displayed on the web page.

Remember to insert your actual API key in the above code.

Output:

You can create an HTML file and copy and paste the above code into it. You can then open the HTML file in your browser, and it’ll show the following output:

Parsing Carrier Information from Phone Numbers

Using proprietary parsing logic can be helpful when you want to get carrier information without relying on external APIs. This method uses known carrier prefixes or patterns to analyze the phone number and obtain carrier information.

Here is the code example:

function parseCarrier(phoneNumber) {
  const carrierPrefixes = {

    // Define carrier prefixes and their corresponding names
    '123': 'Carrier A',

    '456': 'Carrier B',

    '789': 'Carrier C',
    // Add more prefixes and carriers as needed
  };
  const prefix = phoneNumber.slice(0, 3); // Extract the first 3 digits of the phone number

  // Check if the prefix exists in the carrier prefixes

  if (carrierPrefixes.hasOwnProperty(prefix)) {

    return carrierPrefixes[prefix]; // Return the corresponding carrier name
  }
  return 'Unknown'; // If the prefix is not found, return 'Unknown' or handle it accordingly

}

// Usage example such as:

const phoneNumber = '1234567890';

const carrier = parseCarrier(phoneNumber);

console.log('Carrier:', carrier);

However, the drawback of custom parsing logic is its dependency on a current set of carrier prefixes. Maintaining precise and thorough parsing logic can be difficult since carrier prefixes can change over time, and new carriers can be established. Furthermore, this method could not offer as much data as a free carrier lookup API can do.

How to Use the Phone Carrier Information?

If you are a developer trying to use the phone carrier lookup service as a feature in your app, you have the option to customize the experience for users. In order to make it more clear, there can be specific features based on the user’s carrier. This kind of customization can, therefore, greatly increase the user experience. Moreover, carrier-specific features and offers can help strengthen partnerships with carriers.

Moreover, by utilizing carrier data, developers and businesses can enhance fraud detection and prevention tools. For example, it is possible to spot suspicious patterns or behaviours linked to a specific carrier, activating extra security measures or signalling probable fraud. Thus, we can also use carrier-based authentication techniques to add an additional degree of protection. This way, it will be more difficult for unauthorized individuals to access sensitive information or carry out fraudulent activities when the user’s carrier is verified as part of the authentication process.

What are the Best Practices and Considerations to Find Phone Carrier?

When an application is involved with cell phone numbers, there’s always an alarming amount of security issues that come with it. Therefore, you should make sure you prioritize and comply with relevant regulations. Here are some practices:

• Before you use a phone number owner carrier data, get explicit user authorization by outlining the usage’s objectives and parameters in detail. 
• In order to ensure compliance and win over users’ trust, comply with privacy laws like the GDPR.
• Implement a system where users receive error messages that are understandable and helpful. It should describe the problem and offer solutions. 
• If the carrier information is unavailable, think about backup options or alternative delivery techniques. 
• In order to ensure a good user experience, handle edge cases like overseas phone numbers or unsupported carriers efficiently. 

Conclusion

This article covered various ways to find phone carrier information in JavaScript: using APIs and implementing it from scratch. However, we recommend using APIs as it provides more reliable and accurate results. Moreover, implementing from scratch comes with disadvantages, like difficulty maintaining over time. 

In this guide, we’ve used Numverify API.  Numverify provides real-time validation and lookup for phone numbers across 232 countries. You can boost the user experience with personalized features and offers based on carrier information by integrating numverify into your application. You can also strengthen security measures with accurate data for fraud prevention. 

Take advantage of numverify’s powerful capabilities and get started by accessing their API.

FAQs

How to find the carrier of a phone?

You can utilize an online carrier lookup service to find the carrier associated with the given phone number. However, if you want to integrate the carrier lookup feature into your app to find phone carrier information, you can use a reliable API like numverify.

How can I trace a phone number’s details?

You can use numverify to validate phone numbers and retrieve carrier and line-type details.

Is it possible to find the carrier of any phone number, regardless of the country?

Yes, it is possible to find phone carrier details despite the variations in countries. Numverify, for example, provides a lookup service for phone numbers across 232 countries.

Are there any free methods available to find the carrier of a phone number?

Some carrier lookup services, such as Truecaller, offer free plans with limited usage. You can use these services if you are looking for short-term or individual usage.