Method of alerting apartment residents to the arrival of visitors

Abstract

An apartment building alerting system and method are disclosed which use the Public Switching Telephone Network (PSTN) to alert and connect visitors to residents. The PSTN system generally has a visitor interface unit located in the apartment building and is connected over a regular telephone line to a telephone switch located at an end office which serves the local area. The visitor interface unit also includes an auto dialler which takes a resident name, an apartment number or some other means for identifying a particular resident of the apartment building and translates it into a PSTN directory number (DN) associated with the telephone physically located in the resident's apartment. To contact a particular resident a visitor uses the visitor interface to identify a particular resident and the auto dialler proceeds to dial a corresponding PSTN DN associated with the resident. Where the resident answers the call the telephone switch connects the visitor with the resident over the PSTN. The PSTN alerting method uses a Call Waiting Origination switch service in combination with an Advanced Intelligent Network (AIN) supported distinctive signalling service to provide residents with distinctive ringing and with distinctive call waiting services on calls originating from visitor interface.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.