Patent ID: 8305993

Claim:
A communication system comprising: a private cellular base station subsystem to communicate, using a cellular radio frequency air radio interface, with home cellular wireless devices and visiting cellular wireless devices located within a coverage area associated with the private cellular base station subsystem, each of the home cellular wireless devices having associated therewith (i) a public cellular number from a home public land mobile network, and (ii) a private cellular number from a private network associated with the communication system; a private cellular switching subsystem to provide cellular switching functionality within the private network for the home cellular wireless devices in connection with sessions that are associated with the respective private cellular numbers of the respective home cellular wireless devices; and unified communications (UC) functionality to interface the private cellular switching subsystem to a unified communications server in order to provide unified communications services using the home cellular wireless devices; and a base station subsystem/mobile switching center interface gateway to, on a session-by-session basis, cause: calls originating from a home wireless device located within the coverage area made to a telephone number associated with the public land mobile network to be routed to the public land mobile network for the switching thereof; and calls originating from a home wireless device located within the coverage area made to a telephone number associated with the private network to be routed to the private cellular switching subsystem for the switching thereof: wherein: the unified communications functionality is configured to provide presence information related to the home cellular wireless devices to the unified communications server; the unified communications functionality is configured to convert an instant message sent to an address associated with a home cellular wireless device to a short message service (SMS) message to send the SMS message to the home cellular wireless device; and the unified communications functionality is configured to convert a short message service (SMS) message addressed to an instant messaging client sent from a home cellular wireless device, wherein the SMS message is converted to an instant message to send to the instant messaging client.