Patent ID: 7856094

Claim:
A method for providing telecommunications services in a session initiation protocol (SIP) and SS7 environment, the method comprising: at a SIP and SS7 gateway: (a) receiving a SIP INVITE message from a SIP network and relating to a call from an originating SIP proxy server, the SIP INVITE message including a called party number stored in a To field of the SIP INVITE message, wherein receiving the SIP INVITE message includes receiving the SIP INVITE message without any extension headers identifying a type of telecommunications service required for the call; (b) determining, based on the called party number from the SIP INVITE message, the type of telecommunications service required for the call, wherein the type of telecommunications service required for the call includes toll free calling service, wherein determining a type of telecommunications service required for the call includes one of: (i) determining the type of telecommunications service based on a type of the called party number; and (ii) determining the type of telecommunications service by comparing the called party number to a database of called party numbers maintained by the SIP and SS7 gateway that correlates different called party numbers with a plurality of different service types; (c) formulating an SS7 query to a database in an SS7 network based on the identified type of service for the call, wherein the database includes a toll free calling service database; (d) receiving a response from the database to the query; and (e) extracting data from the response and using the data to facilitate completion of the call, wherein the SIP network and the SS7 network are incompatible with each other because the SIP network and the SS7 network use different communications protocols, wherein using the data extracted from the response to facilitate completion of the call includes performing a local number portability (LNP) query to the SS7 network using the data extracted from the response, receiving a LNP response to the LNP query, extracting a directory number (DN) from the LNP response, and forwarding the DN to the originating SIP proxy server.