Andy Moore

Got a WAP site?
Curious about your users?

How to detect the carrier of a mobile phone
from the IP it uses on your WAP site

> download

Running a busy WAP site I’ve been able to build up a pretty comprehensive database of mobile phone IP addresses, user agent and content accept values. This is a huge database that has over two and a half million records and weighs in at 1.3gb. By the time I break it down to unique entries we get a few thousand, from those I’m able to compile this rough list of carriers from their IP address.

I say rough as it needs cleaning up to make the carrier names more ‘human friendly’ rather than being the DNS labels they are. Example DTAG-DIAL14 translates to Deutsche Telekom’s T-Mobile. The data is there, do with it what you wish.

I’ve crunched through this data with some PHP to try and work out the carriers the handsets were using. I then trimmed it by hand to cut a load of spiders, robots, fixed (home or office) connections and other garb that made no sense.

Many of the obscure entries have been checked, many speak volumes without the need to investigate.

If you just want a list of IP addresses used on the mobile internet, their corresponding carrier and the ISO code of the country you can find it here.

This list is by no means exhaustive and only represents the clicks I’ve tracked through the route to market we hold. There’s many more carriers out there than are listed here but if you need to build a carrier specific WAP application and have no data to go on this should perform well as a starting point.

If you use on your WAP site please link to mine.
www.web2txt.co.uk/wap

If you’re more curious as to why anyone would want this or want to know how to harvest this data for your own use I’ll to elaborate a little……

Why you might need it:

You run a WAP site and you need to show users content which is specific to not just their handset but their locale. Such as ordering information, the right currency or maybe even multi-language versions of your mobile site.

You use different SMS aggregators for premium messaging and get different payouts on different networks. It would make sense to show the the user the short code from the aggregator who has the higher payouts.

You’re a stats geek or mobile media whore and just buzz off this kind of thing.

How it came about:

I was impressed when the leading mobile advertising agency Admob upgraded their front page to show incoming traffic, the handset, the country and the actual carrier or network that the user is connecting through. Not just great into but presented in a funky way too.

The way Admob show this to the public looks slick and stylish, as for how they do it on the back end I can only guess. I know have good budgets and a fantastic team of people onboard. What follows here is a poor mans version and lacks any front-end. It’s just a file.

The options to do this through companies like Dialogue cost so much I let out a little wee when I laughed so hard. As much as I love the idea of their Browse and Buy service I have a policy that means I refuse to pay for an API connection.

How to get the data:

Some time back I found a PHP class called Get By Ip that will get the residing country of an IP address by running a query through a Whois Server like whois.arin.net

If we just want to know the country of an IP address this is a cost effective and robust way of getting the data. The limitations of holding state on WAP sites means cookies and sessions can’t always be relied upon and the possibility of having to run a query for each page view means that commercial services like Max Mind are out of the question.

Since I’ve used it I’ve thought Max Mind is a great service and well priced, 99% accurate and half a million queries costs very little really. I just got another million today for $100. It’s just that 500,000 web queries would be eaten up in no time by a busy mobile site. I use it on the website but that can track state with sessions and cookies so it’s okay.

The PHP class above just takes the IP address and returns a few values:

• host
• netname
• country
• person
• address
• phone
• email

Where it says phone this is the contact number of the person responsible for the netblock of the IP queried and NOT the number of the mobile phone browsing your site. Getting a mobile users actual MSISDN is a different story, again Dialogue have the ability to do this but they don’t give you the number, they just give you an encrypted string that ties up with the data on their end. When you want to message (or even bill) that user you send them the encrypted string, they decode it and send your text.

It’s the netname that holds the info we really need. It might return null in which case for that IP it’s game over but this is the way I was able to create the list.

If you use this data on your WAP site please link to us:
www.web2txt.co.uk/wap - thanks.

It’s taken several hours of crunching to build this list plus months of building traffic and logging data so a link or two isn’t too much to ask for.

> download

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 18th, 2007 at 3:28 pm and is filed under mobile, wap. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.