Patent ID: 8520828

Claim:
A method for providing telecommunications services in a session initiation protocol (SIP) and SS7 environment, the method comprising: at a SIP and SS7 gateway: (a) receiving a SIP INVITE message from a SIP network and relating to a call from an originating SIP proxy server, the SIP INVITE message including a called party number stored in a To field of the SIP INVITE message, wherein receiving a SIP INVITE message includes receiving a SIP INVITE message without any extension headers identifying the type of service required for the call, and, in response to receiving the INVITE message, determining whether a telecommunications service is required, and, in response to determining that a telecommunications service is required: (b) determining, based on the called party number from the SIP INVITE message, a type of telecommunications service required for the call, wherein determining a type of telecommunications service required for the call includes: determining the type of telecommunications service by comparing the called party number to a database of called party numbers maintained by the SIP and SS7 gateway that correlates different called party numbers with a plurality of different service types, wherein the plurality of different service types include line information database (LIDB) services, custom local area signaling services (CLASS), and calling name (CNAM) service; (c) formulating an SS7 query to a database in an SS7 network based on the identified type of service for the call; (d) receiving a response from the database to the query; and (e) extracting data from the response and using the data to facilitate completion of the call, wherein the SIP network and the SS7 network are incompatible with each other because the SIP network and the SS7 network use different communications protocols, wherein using the data extracted from the response to facilitate completion of the call includes performing a second query to the SS7 network using the data from the response and receiving a response to the second query.