Patent ID: 7411984

Claim:
A method of providing tone information to at least one of a plurality of nodes in a packet network over which telephone services are transmitted, each of said nodes having one or more attributes comprising one or more of node location, node type and node manufacturer, said method comprising the steps of: a) accessing tone information; b) accessing a plurality of rules about which tone information is to be provided to nodes with which attributes in the communications network, the nodes being tone recipients selected from: media gateways, virtual media gateways and session initiation protocol (SIP) telephones; c) obtaining information about one or more attributes of a particular node in the communications network; d) determining which tone information is to be sent to the particular node on the basis of the rules and the obtained information about the one or more attributes of the particular node; and e) sending the determined tone information to the particular node in a format dependent on said one or more attributes of the particular node.