Telephone identity association and a method of distributing telephone identity association to telephone systems

A method of receiving telephone identity associations comprising:

• providing for a plurality of telephone identity association processors of a plurality of telephone systems for routing calls;
• providing for one or more telephone identity associations by a telephone identity association processor of the plurality of telephone identity association processors, wherein each of said telephone identity associations comprises a telephone number attribute and a telephone system identity attribute,
• the telephone number attribute comprising a telephone number of a user terminal, and
• the telephone system identity attribute comprising an identity of a telephone system to which the user terminal connects for making or receiving a call, wherein the telephone system is able to route a first call to the user terminal with the telephone number;
• distributing said telephone identity associations to each of said plurality of telephone identity association processors of the plurality of telephone systems prior to a routing of the first call to the telephone number from any of the plurality of telephone systems to the telephone system identified in the telephone system identity attribute;
• determining that the telephone system, to which the user terminal with the telephone number connects for making or receiving the call, has changed;
• establishing communications among said plurality of telephone identity association processors of the plurality of telephone systems, and
• updating the telephone system identity attributes of said telephone identity associations at each of the plurality of telephone identity association processors of the plurality of telephone systems to comprise an identity of the changed telephone system, prior to a routing of a second call to the telephone number from any of the plurality of telephone systems to the changed telephone system.

A telephone identity association comprising:

• a telephone number attribute comprising a telephone number of a user terminal;
• a telephone system identity attribute comprising:
• an identity of a telephone system to which the user terminal connects for making or receiving a call, wherein said telephone system identity attribute indicates the telephone system that is able to route a call to the telephone number indicated in the telephone number attribute to the user terminal, and
• a time marker to indicate when the telephone system indicated in said telephone system identity attribute begins to be able to route the call to the user terminal with the telephone number indicated in said telephone number attribute,
• wherein the telephone identity association is one of a plurality of telephone identity associations,
• wherein two or more of the plurality of telephone identity associations comprise a telephone attribute comprising the same telephone number, wherein the two or more of the plurality of telephone identity associations comprise time markers of different values,
• wherein any of a plurality of telephone systems determines which of the two or more of the plurality of telephone identity associations applies to the call to the telephone number based on the values of the time markers in the two or more of the plurality of telephone identity associations.