Toll free and dial up services (1997-08-18)

1. General Information

Most business offers 1-800 toll free service to their customers, thus they are able to enquire information about new product, to perform transactions on telephone without paying long distance charges.

For example, an assurance company in North America would issue only one toll free number, e.g. 1 (800) 345-6789 and has some offices in major cities as Montreal, Toronto, New York, and San Diego. When a customer living in New Brunswick dials the above toll free number, the center which receives call will analyze the area code + NPA of the customer phone and dispatch the call to the nearest service branch, e.g. call is routed to the branch in Montreal.

The above feature could also be deployed to offer Personal Communication Services to telephone/computer users who travel frequently and require access to their home computer system from the hotel. The main/home office would authenticate his request, analyze his calling number, and allow him to log on to a local office, where he is. (The authentication and login process will be done in the background or transparent to the user. The main office is responsible for updating the local office all information that his user needs. After his user hangs up, all transferred personal data should be purged in the local system for security.)

2. Marketing Analysis

As discussed in the previous section, the telephone system operator can setup their system so that all calls will be handled automatically without operator’s assistance. Therefore, there is no need to have a person sitting in the main office and dispatch incoming calls to an appropriate branch. Some companies would be interested in this feature:

·        Food or furniture delivery

·        Company that offers on-line services

·        Car/home Assurance Company

·        Technical Support Center

·        Banks, Master card, Visa, American Express, or credit lines’ organization.

·        Police department

·        Any organization

3. Feature Analysis

3.1 Toll Free Number

·        In the cellular or mobile telephony network, this feature could be easily implemented in the Service Control Point (SCP). As system access, a mobile unit would send his phone number (MIN), and dialled number to the serving MSC. These numbers will be forwarded to the SCP, where those numbers would be analyzed properly based on the toll free number (B-number), and the area code + NPA of caller. SCP will return the new B-number (nearest local service center) and caller’s number to the serving MSC, where a call setup will be performed based on new number (B-number). For example, the SCP operator could create a look up table with Area code and NPA as the search key.

·        A landline telephone network operator could also build a similar system to offer this service to their customers.

3.2 Dial up Services

·        This service helps travelers to retrieve all necessary information and services as he sets up at home office on a short or long term business trip. This helps users to speed up quickly in a new environment.

·        To transfer data and information from his home office to a visited company, an authentication between his home and host company are recommended. More details will be discussed in the next section.

3.3 Process of data transferred between home company and host company

When the traveler is on a short trip, he will dial to his home company as usual, the home company shall perform the following analysis before connecting his employee to the host company (usually a subsidiary company):

·        Authenticate his employee for password and authorization of having need of an account and his business trip duration.

·        Home system will request the host company of setting up a temporary computer account for his employee

·        If authentication process went fine, the host company would setup an account and receive all information and data from the home company.

·        The home company would send his employee the host company dial-up phone number before disconnecting the current call.

·        The employee’s computer (laptop) would use the new phone number to connect to the local host’s computer network.

These notes were written or draft back in 1997. At that time, only dial-up services were offered by Internet Service Providers. Currently, user could carry his laptop to the subsidiary offices, all papers had been communicated between his home office and visited office, i.e. clear to get a WiFi password to remote access to his home office by a secured communications such as VPN. He could download documents or tools down to his laptop by using VPN. Downloading his home/personal settings and data to network of a subsidiary branch would expose security risks.