At+t Corp.

Allen Eisdorfer

Jerry Eisdorfer

Mark Jeffrey Foladare

Shelley Betty Goldman

David Phillip Silverman

Joseph Anderson Alfred

Nancy S Murray

Andreas Constantine Papanicolaou

Jeffrey Charles George

Christopher Gregory Harrington

a telecommunications carrier other than the carrier of last contact is arranged to a) recognize that the telephone to which a particular call is placed is a disconnected telephone and b) provide different call treatment for the call, e.g., different call handling or different call features or services, as compared to the treatment the telecommunications carrier provides for the same call to the same telephone when it is recognized that the telephone is not disconnected. Advantageously, no effort is wasted in an attempt to complete the telephone call to a disconnected telephone. Such different treatments include 1) simply making no attempt to route the call to the disconnected telephone via the network of last contact, 2) routing the call to a secondary, alternate telephone, and 3) initiating transmission of a page to a pager that is associated with the owner of the disconnected telephone.

Technique for use in processing telephone calls

A communications system is designed to allow a call waiting subscriber who is already busy on a first call to receive information associated with a message being recorded by a second caller attempting to reach the subscriber. According to one aspect of the principles disclosed herein, a one-way conference call is established between the second caller and the subscriber as the message is being recorded to allow the subscriber to eavesdrop on the message. According to another aspect of the principles disclosed herein, an Automatic Speech Recognition system may transcribe the message being recorded into ASCII coded data that is delivered to the called party. The received message allows the subscriber to effectively assess whether the first call in progress should be interrupted to answer the second call in waiting.

Advanced call waiting and messaging system

The Multimedia Message System of the present invention provides revenue allocation between disparate sender-receiver service providers on a per message basis for a sender, connected to a telecommunications network of one service provider, sending a message to a receiver, connected to a telecommunications network of another service provider. Each message has a 'message stamp' associated with it which allows for distribution of revenue associated with that individual message among service providers involved for transmission of that message. A Clearinghouse is utilized to issue the message stamps and process revenue allocation for each service provider according to the message stamps. The stamp is added to each message by the clearinghouse to provide for revenue allocation between the originating (sender) and destination (receiver) service providers. Removal or canceling of the stamp is performed by the destination unit that may additionally route the message to a mailbox (e.g., service node) or further destination service providers. The stamp revenue is shared by the message sender service provider, the stamp issuer, and message receiver service provider, the collector of the used/canceled stamp. The canceled stamp may be exchanged or redeemed between the service providers via their respective clearinghouses, for currency or additional stamps according to a predetermined revenue sharing arrangement between participating service providers.

Multimedia message system with revenue allocation

A method and system for selectively routing incoming calls to a requested called party wherein the requested called party is at least one of a group of individuals associated with a plurality of telephones. A database system sends a menu to a calling party so that the calling party may choose an option which corresponds to at least one individual associated with the plurality of telephones. Based on the option chosen by the calling party, the incoming call is routed to one or more destination directory numbers where the requested called party is most likely to be found. The user programmed database includes call treatment parameters corresponding to the most likely location of the requested called party at any given time. Each requested called party is associated with a distinctive alerting signal which is applied to one or more customer identified lines so that the requested called party is uniquely notified of an incoming call.

Method for selectively alerting multiple telephones of an incoming call

In a personal communication service (PCS) environment, where a call to a personal telephone number may be routed to a sequence of telephone numbers until the call is answered or abandoned, and where it is possible that the destination telephones indicated in the sequence may be disconnected telephones such that they are unreachable from any network, a method for avoiding wasteful attempts to route the call by a) determining if any telephone numbers of the sequence correspond to disconnected telephones, and, if so, b) skipping over such telephone numbers, i.e., those of disconnected telephones, so that no attempt is made to complete a PCS call to a disconnected telephone.

Growing community of inventors

Woodbridge, NJ, United States of America

Allen Eisdorfer