Taking the mystery out of the ‘Caller ID’ feature

Ever call someone on the mainland and have them tell you, “I only answered because you’re the only one with an 808 number who ever calls me”? Or worse yet, have someone tell you, “I would’ve answered if I knew it was you”?

While this might seem a slight annoyance or even amusement to individuals, businesses are often well served by having their name displayed to callers. What, then, can folks do to ensure that caller identification information is properly transmitted?

First, we have to understand how “Caller ID” works. In the U.S. the calling party typically transmits only a phone number. Upon receiving the call, the called party’s telephone company does a database look-up to find the name associated with that number. The number and the name are then presented to the called party by their telephone company and — voila! — it displays on the phone.

There are a couple of problems with this approach. First, while it’s often referred to as the CNAM (for caller name) database, it’s actually a collection of separate databases maintained by a disparate set of providers. Further, there is no governing body to set rules and regulations for how the databases should be maintained. There is, for example, no regulation on how often the databases need to be updated. Some of these providers appear to update their database only annually.

The second problem with this disjointed, unregulated approach is that different telephone companies use different providers for their databases. Some use more than one. The most popular database is provided by a company called Neustar. All of these providers are supposed to cooperate with each other, and while they might indeed be making every effort to do so, the lack of standardization and regulation makes this challenging.

The first step to making sure your caller ID information is transmitted properly is controlling what you can. If your business or government agency has a phone system, make sure that system is transmitting the proper number on outgoing calls. A dirty little secret of the industry is that your phone system can pretty much broadcast any number. And, unless this is being done maliciously, it is not illegal (insert “this is not legal advice” disclaimer here).

Some phone companies will prevent you from sending out a number that you do not own, but this process can be inefficient. Even then, if you have a block of numbers and send out one far down the list, it is possible that this number is not registered in any CNAM database.

If you are sure you are broadcasting the right number and folks still do not get the name of your organization, it gets dicey. You can file an update with Neustar, but the only way to do that is to email it at cnamupdate@support.neustar. That’s not a typo; that’s a valid address.

Or, there are services available online that claim to correct such problems, at around $300 a pop. Anecdotally, the success rate of such services is around 50 percent. You also can ask your telephone provider to help, but its hands are somewhat tied. All the telephone provider can do is make sure it sends out the right updates to its database providers. If you’re calling someone whose telephone company doesn’t use the same database, your chances are slim.

In defense of our local telephone service providers, this doesn’t seem to be a problem on their end. But sometimes a single database update spurs changes across all databases. So it doesn’t hurt to try.

What about receiving the correct caller ID? As mentioned above, our local landline providers do a pretty good job of matching names to numbers. Cellphones, on the other hand, are a different story. Most cellphone providers do not provide the caller name as a matter of course. There are, however, add-on services and third-party apps that can help alleviate this issue.

John Agsalud is an IT expert with more than 25 years of information technology experience. Reach him at jagsalud@live.com.