Indicating availability status of services provided by a mobile communication network

摘要

The availability of services to user equipments is increased when the UTRAN temporarily does not work properly, e.g. due to network faults or congestions. For this purpose a first communications network UTRAN (10) provides appropriate status information with regard to the availability of at least a certain range of its services and is capable to re-direct a user equipment (14) to a backup network (11) when the needed service is not available. The network (10) also provides the possibility to continue the usage of services in UTRAN that are still available even if the user equipment (14) intends to apply for a temporarily unavailable service, which the UTRAN (10) can instead arrange to be provided by the backup network (11). This is done by an information element denoting a re-direction retry indication in the RRC Connection Release message including at least the same parameters as a RRC Connection Setup Reject message.