Check if Devices Are Reachable or Roaming With Network APIs
Knowing whether a device is connected, reachable, or roaming in the expected country is important for fraud prevention, service delivery, and regulatory compliance. In this post, we’ll explore how Vonage Network Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) allow you to check device statuses in real time and use that data to build smarter services.
We can check if an online service is down, such as the Vonage API Status. Users may not know if the issues they are experiencing are local, national, or global. This blog post focuses on using Network APIs, which receive data from telecom providers, to check a SIM-enabled device's reachability and roaming status, rather than relying on troubleshooting tools.
For security and fraud reasons, you can check if your users are located where they claim to be. For example, imagine a user buys a ticket to a concert in London, but the device linked to their purchase is detected in another country at the time of the event. This could indicate the ticket was resold on a secondary market or shared inappropriately.
Similarly, if your app offers access to location-restricted media (like streaming a movie that’s only licensed in the UK), you could verify that the user’s device is actually located in that region. By integrating a device status check API, it’s possible to detect discrepancies and increase app security.
During my day-to-day, I’m very good at eating home-cooked food, but whenever I go to my home country, I use food delivery apps fairly often. Many other users and I must know that roaming charges will not be incurred whilst using these delivery services.
Companies can detect if their IoT devices lose connection to the network. They can remotely determine which specific devices require maintenance without physically inspecting them. This helps businesses determine when a device was last online. For example, a base station may have lost connectivity two days ago, and this information helps determine when the device was last online.
Watch this 30-second clip where Diana explains how connectivity checks can help detect when an IoT device, like a smart doorbell, goes offline.
To prevent users from accessing streaming services from locations where access is not permitted, there may be content location restrictions, for instance, local soccer matches that are only available to people in a specific location.
Bank customers may need to be within a particular location for transactions to be authorized and to ensure regulatory compliance if they try to access or make a transaction from a place where they’re not allowed.
When dealing with an emergency, it's important to ensure communication reaches the user through a channel that works. If their device isn't connected to mobile data but is reachable via Short Message Service (SMS), your system can fall back to SMS to deliver critical messages.
These use cases demonstrate real-world applications and show how to check device statuses with the Vonage Network APIs; there are two endpoints as of June 2025.
The /roaming endpoint allows businesses to detect if a device is roaming. And if it is roaming, check the mobile country code for the country the device is roaming in and the name of that country.
These operations are excellent for checking if the user is where they claim to be, preventing fraud, and ensuring compliance.
The /connectivity endpoint allows businesses to query the connectivity status of a device within a telecom mobile network. It’s possible to check if a device is reachable via data, SMS, or if it’s not connected at all.
One useful feature available is "lastStatusTime, which helps businesses check whether a device has been inactive for an extended period, indicating possible disuse, SIM cancellation, or a lost device.
So if a device is not pinging now, but it was 3 days ago, you can see the result from that moment.
This could allow an organization to identify that a customer's phone number no longer exists as its status is over 60 days old.
By doing operations to check the connectivity of a device, it’s possible to optimize the usage of network resources, adapt the communication method, and allow the messages to be sent successfully.
Note: You can develop and test with the Virtual Operator, as this API is not currently connected to a live telecommunication network, using the Network APIs Playground.
Vonage’s Network APIs make it easy to check whether a device is reachable or roaming. These capabilities help developers improve fraud detection, optimize service delivery, and maintain compliance.
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