Patent ID: 7020253

Claim:
A method of reporting utilization of call queues, each call placed from a caller to a subscriber line, the call processed by an Advanced Intelligent Network (AIN) having at least one central office switch and a service control point (SCP) in electrical communication with a plurality of subscriber switches via a signaling network, the method comprising: providing an intelligent peripheral in electrical communication with the at least one central office switch and the SCP, the intelligent peripheral equipped with call queuing functionality; receiving each of a plurality of calls to access the subscriber line; monitoring call signaling to detect a termination attempt trigger; launching a query at the SCP for receipt by the intelligent peripheral requesting the queue status of the subscriber line in response to the detected termination attempt trigger; forwarding the call to the intelligent peripheral to be added to the queue in response to a determination that the queue is active; delivering the call to the subscriber and setting a next event list trigger to determine the status of a subscriber line in response to a determination that the queue is empty; connecting the call to the subscriber line in response to a determination that the line is idle; forwarding the call to the intelligent peripheral to be placed in queue in response to a determination that the subscriber line is busy; collecting queue utilization information about each queued call in the service control point; and generating queue utilization statistics based on the collected queue utilization information.