Technique for providing redundant capability in a personal mobile

Abstract

In providing personal telephone calling capability as a service, for reliability purposes, it is necessary to have available several independent meet-me systems, to provide redundant capability in the event of a failure of any one of them. Each meet-me system has at least 1) one meet-me bridge and 2) its own telephone trunks directly connecting it to the telephone network over which it receives return calls. A problem with doing so is insuring that the return call is properly bridged to the caller's call when a) the telephone number for the return call is a predetermined translatable telephone number and b) the particular one of the meet-me systems to which the caller's call is connected is determined only upon receiving in the network the call placed by the caller. To overcome this problem, at least each time a caller's call is routed to different one of the meet-me systems, the network routing data base which translates the dialed translatable telephone number of the return telephone call into a network routing telephone number is updated so that it will direct a return call for the caller's call to the same meet-me system to which the caller's call was routed. Advantageously, a hot-spare standby is not needed for each meet-me system. Instead, one additional meet-me system provides the capability to back-up the failure of any single one of the other meet-me systems.