US 5,742,905 · Granted 1998-04-21

The 1998 Patent That Let You Control Messages From Your Palm Pilot

Imagine being able to tell your phone where to send your calls and texts before they even reach you—redirecting them to your cell phone, your home phone, or to voicemail based on what you want in that moment. This patent describes a system that acts like a smart traffic controller for all your messages across different networks, letting you manage everything from a handheld device.

Curated and verified by the IsItPatented Editorial team

The plain-English version

What it protects

The patent covers a system that sits between wireless and wireline networks and lets subscribers remotely control how their voice calls and text messages are routed and delivered. What's protected here is the combination of a database that stores a subscriber's delivery preferences, the ability to access and update those preferences remotely (whether by wireless or wired connection), and the system's ability to translate between different message formats as needed. Someone building a competing service that offered this same remote call-routing and message-delivery control would be stepping on this patent's claims.

Why it matters

This patent captures an early vision of unified communications management—the idea that your phone number could be smart enough to follow you and adapt to your needs rather than forcing you to carry multiple devices or remember multiple numbers. Filed in 1994 and granted in 1998, it arrived during a pivotal moment when mobile phones were becoming practical tools and people were juggling landlines, pagers, and emerging wireless networks. Bell Communications Research (Bellcore) was essentially patenting the infrastructure logic that would later power voicemail-to-email systems, call forwarding rules, and modern unified messaging platforms.

Real-world use

When you set your smartphone to forward calls to a different number during work hours, or when a messaging app lets you choose which device receives notifications, you're using the kind of remote call-control logic this patent described nearly three decades ago.

Original USPTO abstract

A person communications internetworking provides a network subscriber with the ability to remotely control the receipt and delivery of wireless and wireline voice and text messages. The network operates as an interfaces between various wireless and wireline networks, and also performs media translation, where necessary. 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. The subscriber may be provided with CallCommand service which provides real-time control of voice calls while using a wireless data terminal or PDA.

Patent details

Publication number: US 5,742,905
Filing date: 1994-09-19
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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