Patent ID: 8331219

Claim:
A method of responding to a control link failure between an Access Gateway and a Soft Switch, wherein the Soft Switch has access to a current user dial plan required for call setup, said method comprising the steps of: maintaining the current user dial plan in a memory in the Access Gateway, said maintaining step including the following steps performed prior to failure of the control link: in response to initial establishment of the control link, downloading the current dial plan from the Soft Switch to the Access Gateway; and storing the downloaded current dial plan in the Access Gateway memory; and in response to the control link failure between said Access Gateway and said Soft Switch, setting up the call internally in the Access Gateway utilizing the stored user dial plan from the Access Gateway memory; wherein the maintaining step also includes automatically updating the user dial plan in the Access Gateway whenever there is a change in the user dial plan, wherein the step of automatically updating the user dial plan includes the steps of: receiving by the Soft Switch, changed information in the user dial plan; in response to receiving the chanced information, automatically downloading the changed information to the Access Gateway; and modifying the stored user dial plan by the Access Gateway utilizing the changed information received from the Soft Switch.