Automatic Number Identification(ANI)
The originating phone number carried in call signaling, the number that placed the call.
What it means in practice
ANI is what the carrier says is the calling party. Different from caller ID, which can be set separately. For inbound calls, ANI is the number your customer dialed from; VICIdial stores it as the call_detail.phone_number field. For outbound, ANI is determined by your carrier, usually the number you've provisioned and assigned via your SIP trunk.
In VICIPanel
VICIPanel's call detail view shows ANI, CID, and any carrier-level manipulation (STIR/SHAKEN attestation level, CNAM lookup result) side-by-side so you can debug attribution problems in seconds.
Related terms
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Telephony
Caller ID
The phone number shown on the recipient's phone when an outbound call arrives, set at the carrier or dialer layer.
Compliance
STIR/SHAKEN
A pair of standards for cryptographically attesting that a calling party is authorized to use the caller ID they're presenting.
Telephony
SIP Trunk
A virtual telephony connection between your VICIdial system and a carrier, using Session Initiation Protocol.
See VICIdial the way it should look
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