Original Carrier

The Original Carrier insight provides low-latency information about the carrier and network type originally associated with a phone number, using Vonage’s proprietary Numbering Plan intelligence. It offers metadata without requiring live queries to third party suppliers or operators, making it fast and reliable for many use cases.

While this insight focuses on the original assignment rather than any subsequent changes, therefore not reflecting portability changes, it remains highly valuable for identifying the nature of a phone number. It can indicate whether a number was initially designated as mobile, landline, toll-free, premium-rate, or virtual—categories often relevant for fraud prevention, cost control, and user qualification.

Key benefits include:

• Fraud risk signals: Spot virtual, premium, or high-risk number types that may indicate impersonation or artificially inflated traffic.
• Cost efficiency: Avoid engaging with expensive or invalid numbers early in the process.
• Data quality: Pre-screen leads and customer records by understanding the number’s origin.

Original Carrier is ideal for businesses looking to streamline communications, reduce artificial inflated traffic, and optimize their number-based workflows with lightweight intelligence.

Prerequisites

To use Identity Insights, you must ensure your account is configured correctly; see the Getting Started guide for more information on:

• Creating your account,
• Creating a Vonage application for use with the Identity Insights API,
• The different environments available and how to configure your account to use them,
• And how to use the Dashboard Getting Started UI to use the API without writing any code.

This guide will explain how to use the Original Carrier Insight programatically using cURL.

Making an API Call

Authentication for the Identity Insights API is done via JWTs, a compact and self-contained JSON token. To generate a JWT, you can use our online generator, or alternatively use the Vonage CLI. You will need your application ID and private key to generate the JWT. Once you have your JWT, you can send a request to the API.

This example shows a cURL request for the Original Carrier insight:

curl -X POST https://api-eu.vonage.com/v0.1/identity-insights \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $JWT" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "phone_number": "14040000000",
    "purpose": "FraudPreventionAndDetection",
    "insights": {
      "original_carrier": {}
        }
    }'

The API will then return information about the network the phone number is currently assigned to, including the name, network type, and country code:

{
  "request_id": "c2cc7a65-9b10-493f-9c0a-1c86751a91c4",
  "insights": {
    "original_carrier": {
        "name": "Orange Espana, S.A. Unipersonal",
        "network_type": "MOBILE",
        "country_code": "ES",
        "network_code": "21403",
        "status": {
        "code": "NO_COVERAGE",
        "message": "Success"
        }
    }
}

You'll see the following fields in the original_carrier array:

Further Reading

• Read more about the Identity Insights API in the API Reference.
• If you have any questions, you can reach out to us on the Vonage Community Slack.