Telephone Number Allocation

• US 20080187122A1
• Filed: 01/17/2006
• Published: 08/07/2008
• Est. Priority Date: 01/20/2005
• Status: Abandoned Application

• Current Assignee: Colin Lawrence Melvin Baker
• Original Assignee: Colin Lawrence Melvin Baker
• Inventors: Baker, Colin Lawrence Melvin
• Application Number:
  US11/813,633
• Publication Number:
  US 20080187122A1
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 379/218.01
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 12/66 Arrangements for connecting between networks having differing types of switching systems, e.g. gateways

Abstract

To provide a globally useful telephone number a character string which may be similar to an email address may be provided to a mobile phone server or an internet server for translation to the actual phone number and establishment of a call to that number.

Claims

1. A method of looking up a phone address as a URI comprising allocating a URI as the phone address, the URI being located within an existing authority domain, on interrogation of the domain recognising that the URI does not relate to a valid page, subsequently comparing the URI with a list of phone number aliases, and returning the phone number to which the alias relates to the interrogating process.

2. A method as claimed in claim 1 wherein the URI is a URL and the phone number alias is formatted as a userinfo subcomponent in an authority domain name.

3. A method as claimed in claim 2 wherein the URL includes a delimiter replacing the standard userinfo delimiter.

4. A method as claimed in claim 1 wherein the URI is a URL and the phone number alias is formatted as a subcomponent of the authority domain name with an identifiable first subcomponent.

5. A method as claimed in claim 4 wherein the first subcomponent is “

gpn”

.

6. A method of providing an alias to a telephone number comprising specifying a phone number alias as a validly formatted hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) address, detecting on query at the server corresponding to the address that the address does not relate to a valid HTTP page, confirming that the address relates to a phone number alias, and returning to the querying process the phone number and location relating to the alias.

7. A method as claimed in claim 6 wherein the location identifies the phone code for a country.

8. A method as claimed in claim 6 wherein the phone number and location are returned in standard international phone number format.

9. An apparatus for translating a telephone number being syntactically a valid domain name, the apparatus having:

a recogniser at the server representing the domain name which detects the syntactically valid domain name as a non-existent domain name reference and attempts to match the syntactically valid domain name against an entry in a list of phone number aliases

wherein on detecting a match the recogniser returns the phone number of which the syntactically valid domain name is the alias.

10. An apparatus for translating a telephone number alias presented as a userinfo prefix, an authority domain name suffix and a valid URI separator between the two, the apparatus having:

a domain name recogniser

a recogniser for the separator which recognises it as denoting the prefix as being a phone number alias

a phone number alias lookup which returns the phone number equivalent to the userinfo prefix.

11. An apparatus as claimed in claim 10 wherein the apparatus is incorporated in a web server.