Overview

The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better than a C, the idea must be feasible.

A Yale University management professor in response to Fred Smith s paper proposing a reliable overnight delivery service. (Smith went on to found Federal Express Corporation)

This chapter explores some commonly used examples of the application of IN principles to telecommunications services. As we have indicated previously, IN was primarily intended for voice services, so most of the examples described here are therefore, unsurprisingly, voice features. Many of the examples are variants of the number translation capabilities of IN, but IN number translation has many interesting and revenue-producing guises, as we shall demonstrate in the next few pages.

7.1 Simple number translations Freephone service

The simplest use for an intelligent network is to provide a straightforward number translation service. This really was the way IN started, as we have discussed in earlier chapters. With conventional telephony networking the service intelligence is distributed across the exchanges and the exchange processors pass service information to each other using the common control signalling system. Service and customer data are therefore distributed across the telephony network and conventional (proprietary) exchange management systems are used for data maintenance. The key advantage of using IN technology, however, is that the service logic and customer data is logically held in one place. The management of this data is therefore decoupled from traditional telephony data input systems, and state-of-the-art computing technology can be used for efficient control...