US 5,742,668 · Granted 1998-04-21

The 1995 Patent That Let You Control Your Messages From Anywhere

Imagine being able to tell your phone exactly how and where you want to receive text messages—whether by wireless or regular phone line—and being able to change those rules on the fly from anywhere. This patent describes a central hub that sits between different types of networks and lets you manage everything from one control panel.

Curated and verified by the IsItPatented Editorial team

The plain-English version

What it protects

The claim covers a system that acts as an intermediary between wireless and wired communication networks, allowing a subscriber to remotely customize how and where they receive electronic messages. What's protected here is the specific architecture of a database that stores a user's message routing preferences, plus the ability to access and modify those preferences wirelessly or over traditional phone lines, directing incoming messages to different endpoints based on those stored rules.

Why it matters

Filed in 1995 and granted in 1998, this patent captures an early vision of unified message management—the idea that users should control their own communications flow across multiple networks rather than being locked into one channel. At the time, the internet was still emerging and cell phones were separate from landlines; this patent imagined bridging them. It represents foundational thinking about network interoperability and user-controlled routing that influenced how modern unified messaging systems evolved.

Real-world use

When you set up call forwarding on your phone or create rules in an email app to route certain messages to different folders based on the sender, you're using concepts this patent staked out decades earlier.

Original USPTO abstract

A personal communications internetwork provides a personal communications internetwork providing a network subscriber with the ability to remotely control the receipt and delivery of wireless and wireline electronic text messages. The network operates as an interface between wireless and wireline networks. The subscriber's message receipt and delivery options are maintained in a database which the subscriber may access by wireless or wireline communications to update the options programmed in the database.

Patent details

Publication number: US 5,742,668
Filing date: 1995-06-06
Grant date: 1998-04-21
Assignee: Bell Communications Research, Inc.
Inventor(s): PEPE; DAVID MATTHEW, BLITZER; LISA B., BROCKMAN; JAMES JOSEPH, CRUZ; WILLIAM, HAKIM; DWIGHT OMAR, KRAMER; MICHAEL, PETR; DAWN DIANE, RAMAROSON; JOSEFA, RAMIREZ; GERARDO, WANG; YANG-WEI, WHITE; ROBERT G.
CPC class: H04W4/12

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