Patent ID: 7558578

Claim:
A method of operating a mobile telephone in a cellular telephone communications system including a plurality of mobile network service providers and a plurality of land line network service providers, the method comprising: storing preferred route codes in a look-up table of the mobile telephone, each preferred route code identifying a mobile network service provider and a land line network service provider to be used to route a call to a corresponding call destination and based on results of a route selection decision by a control centre remote from the mobile telephone; originating an outgoing telephone call to a call destination by the input of user generated call destination information; accessing the look-up table using an address determined at least in part by the user generated call destination information to obtain a selected preferred route code that corresponds to the call destination; selecting a communication channel of the mobile network service provider identified by the selected preferred route code corresponding to the call destination; transmitting the selected preferred route code via the selected communication channel to establish communication for the outgoing telephone call to the call destination corresponding to the user generated call destination information via the mobile network service provider and the land line network service provider identified by the selected preferred route code; and periodically scanning received transmissions to identify available communications channels for which the mobile telephone has functional capability and attempting to complete a registration procedure for each available channel, wherein said selecting comprises selecting from those available channels of said cellular telephone communications system in respect of which registration is completed.