Patent ID: 7426384

Claim:
A communications system, comprising: a plurality of telecommunications networks, each of which: provides subscriber terminals thereof with a respective publicly-known telephone number for allowing communications to be addressed to each subscriber terminal, allows selected subscriber terminals thereof to be associated together in a group such that those subscriber terminals can address communications to one another using a respective code allocated to each of the selected subscriber terminals; and includes an intelligent node configured to correlate the code of each of the selected terminals into the corresponding publicly-known telephone number thereof; and an International VPN Mediation and Provisioning (IMP) system for maintaining a database of the codes and corresponding publicly-known telephone numbers of all of said networks and for providing to one of said networks a publicly-known telephone number corresponding to a code of a subscriber terminal of another one of said networks to allow communication from a subscriber terminal of said one of the networks to be addressed to a subscriber terminal of said other of the networks using the code of the latter subscriber terminal.