System and Method for Placing a Mobile Telephone Call on a Secondary Network

Abstract

A system and method for placing cellular toll calls over a secondary network to allow a subscriber to save money or realize some other advantage. Either a small software package can be downloaded to a mobile user's telephone to act as an interface into the service or the internet can be used with a wireless application protocol (WAP) using a WAP browser on the mobile telephone. A manager station operated by a third party (generally not the cellular network owner nor the secondary network owner) can receive request calls for cellular users to place toll calls. In a particular embodiment, the software in the user's mobile telephone can transmit the number desired to be called via a mobile data service like GPRS or WAP over GPRS to the manager station. Any method of transmitting this number is within the scope of the present invention including a direct mobile telephone call to the manager station. The manager station can then place two outgoing calls over the secondary network, the first to the called number, and the second a callback to the originating mobile telephone. The called number can be either a mobile or fixed station. When each of the two outgoing calls is set up, the manager can connect or conference the two calls together. The number of calls is not limited to two. After the calls are connected, the manager can track of billing for the service using methods known in the art.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.