We have learned that Neustar, a TransUnion company, has made a change affecting the Caller Name (CNAM) data they return for a phone number.
Some background:
While there is no formal, singular, national database for CNAM storage, the industry has more or less standardized Neustar’s solution. Carriers provide names to be associated with the phone numbers they own to Neustar, and Neustar aggregates all this data in what is known as the Line Information Database (LIDB). Carriers then pay Neustar to be able to lookup the name associated with a phone number and inject the name into an incoming call to be presented to the user who receives the call. This is a process that has been in place for decades.
What’s happening today:
Years ago, AT&T contracted with TransUnion to build a caller reputation service (i.e. the service that determines when “Spam Likely” should be shown for an inbound call) leveraging TransUnion’s data. Verizon and T-Mobile use alternative providers to power this feature in their networks. Given TransUnion’s position in the incoming call flow to mobile phones, these caller reputation service providers saw an additional opportunity to not only flag spam calls but also provide “enhanced” data about the caller to be presented on receiver’s mobile device. This new solution has become known generally as “Branded Caller ID” or “Caller ID Reputation Management” within the industry and is still within its infancy in terms of rollout and adoption.
TransUnion offers this service under the product name Caller Name Optimization (CNO). In this new solution it is not the carriers that submit information to populate the database, as is the case with the LIDB, but rather the “Enterprise” (i.e. the end business) that must interface directly with TransUnion, and its peers, to establish the enhanced data to be displayed when mobile subscribers receive calls.
In late May Neustar made a change to the process they use to return Caller Name information. Instead of just returning the value in the LIDB, they began consulting their CNO database and returning its value (if the phone number existed in it), before deferring to their LIDB database. Unfortunately, the quality of the data in the CNO database appears to be poor in many cases and therefore often the “Name” value for a given phone number in that database is just the phone number itself.
Neustar/TransUnion states that it’s the Enterprise/ end business that gave them this bad data, but considering the number of reports SkySwitch has received from its partners, the situation seems more systemic, so we are continuing to investigate the matter.
A workaround:
If you have Phone Numbers you suspect have been affected by this change you can confirm the value that Neustar is returning for your phone number in DashManager by going to Telco > Phone Numbers > On Specific Phone Number, clicking the “Edit CNAM” tag icon > Outbound CNAM tab and then look at the name value that is being returned by Neustar as shown in the screenshot below.