Phone number portability — the ability for consumers to keep their number when switching carriers — is a convenience for users but a significant challenge for SMS routing. When a number moves from Verizon to T-Mobile to Google Voice, your messaging platform may still be routing based on the original carrier data, leading to failed deliveries and wasted spend. Understanding how phone number portability affects your campaigns is the first step toward fixing delivery issues at scale.
Why Portability Affects SMS and Voice Campaigns
Several delivery challenges emerge when portability isn’t accounted for:
- Incorrect Routing — Using area codes or outdated carrier information may direct messages to wrong networks, causing delivery failures.
- Higher Delivery Failure Rates — Ported numbers frequently get misclassified as invalid or landline-based when systems rely on antiquated data.
- Reduced Message Throughput — SMS aggregators may throttle or block sends to unverified or misrouted numbers.
- Compliance Risks — Automated messaging to incorrect line types without proper consent creates regulatory exposure.
Why Static or Area Code-Based Data Falls Short
Traditional validation tools check only the original carrier using area codes and prefixes. This approach fails because area codes no longer correlate with geography, prefixes don’t indicate current carrier type, and VoIP/mobile designations change frequently.
Businesses need current carrier information, not historical data. A real-time carrier lookup solves this by querying the actual network rather than relying on stale records.
How CheckThatPhone Handles Portability
The platform queries real-time carrier data from U.S. and Canadian networks, providing:
- Current carrier name
- Line type classification
- Porting history status
- Routing number for accurate SMS routing
- Deactivation and suspension details
By validating phone numbers through the API, you get up-to-date portability information that reflects where the number lives today, not where it was originally registered.
Getting Started
Phone number portability remains invisible to consumers but critically impacts business messaging operations. Real-time telecom data ensures accurate SMS routing and regulatory compliance. CheckThatPhone makes it simple to account for ported numbers before you send — read the documentation to integrate portability checks into your workflow, or view pricing plans to get started with the volume that fits your needs.