Check if Devices Are Reachable or Roaming With Network APIs

Introduction

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 the Identity Insights API allows you to check device statuses in real time and use that data to build smarter services.

Use Cases

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 the Identity Insights API, which receives data from telecom providers,  to check a SIM-enabled device's reachability and roaming status, rather than relying on troubleshooting tools.

Location-Based Fraud Prevention 

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.

Service Delivery Addresses

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.

User Compliance

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.

Emergency Services

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.

Identity Insights Endpoints

These use cases demonstrate real-world applications and show how to check device statuses with the Identity Insights API.

Roaming 

The roaming Insight 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 Insight is excellent for checking if the user is where they claim to be, preventing fraud, and ensuring compliance.

Reachability 

The reachability Insight 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. 

By performing 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 these Insights are not currently connected to a live telecommunication network.

Conclusion

Vonage’s Identity Insights API makes it easy to check whether a device is reachable or roaming. These capabilities help developers improve fraud detection, optimize service delivery, and maintain compliance.