VIRTUAL SECOND LINE HYBRID NETWORK COMMUNICATION SYSTEM

摘要

A system and method for routing a telephone call (10) on a PSTN network (14) to a data device (18). The present invention utilizes an automatic call processing system that has a one number location service. A called party provides a calling profile that is stored in the automatic call processing (ACP) system (16). When a call is placed to a telephone number that is assigned to the called party, the call is routed to the ACP system (16). The ACP system (16) calls each of the numbers of the calling profile for that called party until that party is reached. At least one of the destinations in the calling profile is a logical address for a data network. The automatic call processing system (16) recognizes the logical address and queries a directory (22) to determine if an IP address has been registered in the directory for the logical address of the called party. If the called party is using a data device (18) that is logged on the Internet (20), an IP telephony agent (19), such as an IP telephony client running on the data device (18), registers the IP address of the data device (18) together with the logical address of the caller. If the ACP system (16) determines if an IP address is registered with the directory (22), the ACP system (16) will direct the call to an Internet telephony gateway (28). The gateway (28) encodes and packetizes the voice information for transmission over the data network (20) to the data device (18).