Speed calling when away from home

Abstract

An arrangement for permitting callers to make speed dialing calls away from their home telephone. A speed dialing list is maintained for those who subscribe to this service for a particular telephone line. When the caller who normally uses that line and makes use of his/her speed dialing feature from that line, and is away from his/her telephone, speed dialing service can be obtained if the call is a calling card, or credit/debit card telephone call. Such calls are routed initially to a switch for serving such calls. This switch then queries a calling card or credit card data base to obtain either a number corresponding to the caller's speed calling number, or to obtain an identification of the switch which contains that caller's speed dialing list. The caller is identified by his/her calling card, or credit/debit card number. If the data base provides a number, or other data for directly deriving the destination number corresponding to a speed dialed number, then the calling card server switch can complete the call to that number. Otherwise, the calling card server switch queries the caller's home switch to obtain the required speed dialing information, and then completes the call. Advantageously, this arrangement allows callers who may have forgotten the directory number corresponding to a speed calling number, to use their speed calling feature along with credit card calls even when they are away from their home telephone. Additionally, this type of arrangement can be used to allow callers to call their home telephone by providing their calling card number plus an indication, such as # or *; the calling card number is used to access a data base to provide the telephone number of the home telephone of the calling card holder.