Patent ID: 7570631

Claim:
A cable infrastructure to operate with a public switched telephony network, a cable network and an Internet network, comprising: a plurality of cable modem circuits that couple to the cable network, wherein each of the plurality of cable modem circuits is associated with a subscriber; a plurality of telephones, each having both a POTS (Plain Old Telephone System) interface and a unique telephone number, in which each of the plurality of telephones is associated with a corresponding subscriber; a plurality of interface circuits, each coupling a corresponding cable modem circuit with a corresponding POTS interface of a corresponding telephone; and a head end system coupled to the cable network, the public switched telephony network, and the Internet network, in which the head end system supports address mapping of a plurality of terminal addresses for a particular subscriber that enables communication exchanges between the telephones and Internet telephony devices, wherein the head end system is further operable to receive a location update from the particular subscriber that includes a new network address of an active terminal for the particular subscriber, to store the new network address in the address mapping associated with the particular subscriber and to track the currently active terminal for the particular subscriber by last usage in the address mapping, in which the plurality of terminal addresses for the particular subscriber includes a current Internet (IP) address of a roaming voice over Internet (VoIP) terminal and in which the head end system tracks a location and corresponding IP address of the roaming VoIP terminal, wherein the head end system is operable to alert a particular POTS telephone associated with the particular subscriber of an incoming call through the cable network, wait for pickup by the particular POTS telephone associated with the particular subscriber, and when the particular POTS telephone picks up, to service the incoming call to terminate to the particular POTS telephone, but when the particular POTS telephone does not pickup, to forward the incoming call to a currently active terminal of the subscriber and when the currently active terminal is the roaming VoIP terminal, to forward the incoming call over the Internet network to the roaming VoIP terminal at the current IP address noted in the address mapping associated with the particular subscriber.