Patent ID: 8385232

Claim:
A telephone system, comprising: a flexible alerting system of a cellular communication network, configured to manage groups of telephone numbers, each group represented by a different pilot telephone number, wherein: in response to an inbound call placed to a pilot telephone number identifying one of the groups of telephone numbers, received on the cellular communication network, the flexible alerting system routes a first inbound call leg to a cellular telephone assigned to the pilot telephone number and a second inbound call leg to a first telephone number associated with a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) client, the pilot telephone number is a mobile directory number of the cellular communication network assigned to the cellular telephone, and the newly identified group of telephone numbers includes at least the pilot telephone number and the first telephone number associated with the VoIP client; and a VoIP server, configured to: establish an inbound call to the VoIP client in response to the second inbound call leg routed to the first telephone number by the flexible alerting system of the cellular communication network, establish an outbound call with caller identification data set to correspond to the mobile directory number in response to an outbound call originated by the VoIP client so that the outbound call originated by the VoIP client appears as an outbound call by the mobile directory number, automatically route an outbound call from a VoIP phone to the pilot telephone number, to a voice mail system for voice mail retrieval, the VoIP phone belonging to the group of telephone numbers represented by the pilot telephone number, and establish another outbound call from the VoIP phone to the cellular telephone, without the another outbound call being automatically directed to the voice mail system, in response to use of a special dial string or dial prefix that indicates to not use the mobile directory number for caller identification.