Ordinarily, when somebody calls you, the only caller information available is the caller’s phone number. This is often not enough. Sometimes an unwanted call may get through and you may want to avoid the conversation. It is therefore important to see not only the original caller’s number but also the caller ID (name and surname, or company name that owns the number).
Integration with a CNAM provider lets you offer the Caller ID Lookup feature to your customers so that they can see the caller ID information and respond accordingly. Currently PortaSwitch is integrated with OpenCNAM, which supports numbers from the USA and Canada.
When an incoming call arrives to PortaSIP (1), it sends an authorization request to the billing engine (2) and checks whether the account receiving the call has the Caller ID Lookup feature enabled (3). If enabled, PortaSIP sends a request with the caller number to the CNAM provider (4) and receives the caller ID in response (5). The caller ID is then shown on the recipient phone’s display (6).
For PortaSIP to send CNAM requests, CNAM provider credentials must be defined on the Configuration server.
This feature can be enabled for each account on the account’s Service Configuration tab. Note that if both the caller and the party called consist of two separate accounts within a specific PBX environment, then the CNAM request will not be made and the caller ID information provisioned in PortaBilling will be shown instead.
