Maintenance and administration of remote systems via radio pager

Abstract

An integral radio pager within each remote switch of a switching system with all pagers in the remote switches sharing the same paging service number with respect to a public paging service. When a central processor that is controlling the operation of all remote switches performs a maintenance restart operation with respect to one of the remote switches, the central processor requests that the public paging service page the common service number. The central processor also provides the paging service a paging message that defines which remote switch is to respond to the page. Each integral pager is responsive to the page to interrupt an associated remote processor. In turn, each remote processor is responsive to the pager to examine the paging message and only responds if the remote processor finds its own identification number in the paging message. In addition, the remote switches can each have an integral cellular telephone circuit that share a common telephone number thereby reducing the cost of providing the cellular telephone service. When the central processor wants to establish a data communication link with the remote switch via a cellular telephone call, the central processor requests that the public paging service page the common service number and provides a paging message to the public paging service. The paging message defines the identification number of the remote switch that is to respond to the page. A remote processor is responsive to the paging message to set up a data call via the integral cellular circuit to the central processor.