Verizon Patent and Licensing Inc.

Mci Worldcom, Inc.

Mci Communications Corporation

Phillip D Crable

Curtis E Allen

Deanna D Willoughby

David E Phelps

Timothy M Dwight

Brian S Badger

Allen Holmes

James L Verlare

Mariafranca Gregorat

Gregory Welch

Yung-Hwa Tai

Richard L McClain

Judy A Moldenhauer

Yaron Raps

Steven L Lass

Jeffrey W Campbell

Sandra A Paiement

Shannon S Smith

Richard L Mc Clain

At least one device receives a call request from a calling party to a called party. The device routes the call request to an Internet Protocol Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) core when a first condition is met and bypasses the IMS core when a second condition is met.

Network routing

A method includes receiving a session initiation protocol (SIP) invite message and identifying a particular service associated with the SIP invite message. The method may also include identifying a destination for the SIP invite message using status information associated with a number of servers and forwarding the SIP invite message to the destination. The method may also further include identifying a first application server based on the SIP invite message and allocation information associated with allocating traffic among a number of application servers.

Routing calls in a network

Non-toll calls originating from payphones may be blocked. An intelligent node is provided within the telecommunications network to identify whether a non-toll call originated from a payphone. The intelligent node may apply a number of different criteria to determine whether to block a non-toll call that is determined to have originated from a payphone. The intelligent node may be customized to apply criteria based upon customer request. The customer may also identify additional processing that is to be performed when a call is to be blocked.

Call blocking based on call properties

A telecommunications network includes computing intelligence for billing call processing on a per transaction basis. In particular, a customer is charged separately for each usage of a remote computing resource that assists in call processing. The remote computing resource, may be, for example, an intelligent call router located within the telecommunications network or on a customer's premises. The transaction billing performed by the present invention results in equitable billing of customers based upon use.

Transaction billing for special service telephone numbers

Enhanced voice services (EVS) interactively communicate with a caller so as to provide audio prompting and selection of the final termination of a call. The present improvement includes load balancing, wherein degraded service of audio response units (ARUs) is detected. With load balancing, individual EVS ARU nodes are lumped into groups, where a group is a set of two or more functionally identical EVS audio response units (ARUs) that all support the same EVS customer applications. An inbound call for a given EVS application can be routed, based on a lookup at the data access point (DAP), to any ARU in the group. With the operating level of each ARU in a particular group being known, the percent allocations for each ARU are determined and an update is made at the DAP to route incoming calls to each ARU in the group according to the specified percentages. The load balancing process operates with a set of predefined rules for determining ARU statuses and call allocations, and also has the ability to actually throttle back calls if multiple nodes in an ARU group are degraded.

Enhanced voice services load balancing

Growing community of inventors

Falcon, CO, United States of America

Phillip D Crable