Patent ID: 7130650

Claim:
A telecommunications system arranged for delivering a message to terminal equipment, the system comprising: queuing equipment for queuing messages that could not be delivered; a plurality of service points, each for signaling whether a respective reason for not delivering the message is asserted; and switching equipment arranged to consult the plurality of service points to determine whether at least one of the reasons has been asserted, and if so, to queue the message in the queuing equipment instead of delivering the message, the queuing equipment being arranged to initiate a retry of the message from the queue upon receiving a trigger signal from at least one of the service points, wherein the queuing equipment is arranged to maintain a plurality of logical queues corresponding to the reasons for not delivering the message, each for queuing messages that could not be delivered for a different one of the reasons or combination of the reasons, wherein each of the service points supports a state in which the service point sends a trigger signal to the queuing equipment upon deassertion of the respective one of the reasons signaled by that service point, wherein the queuing equipment is arranged to set to said state, each service point that signaled that its reason was asserted, to select one of the queues dependent on the asserted reason, and to move the message into the selected one of the queues if the reason was asserted, wherein the queuing equipment is arranged to initiate a retry of delivery of one or more messages from each particular queue upon receiving the trigger signal corresponding to deassertion of the reason or reasons corresponding to that particular queue.