Service mobility/transparency for personal communications

Personal communications services require that subscriber services be made available to users independent of their physical location. Services can be separated into their components of feature construct, common data, and user-specific data. Mobility can also be separated into local roaming, within the network provider´s common control area, across control areas, and across providers. The author discusses the pros and cons of several approaches to providing service mobility/transparency: using an advanced intelligent network (AIN) to bring service profile data to the mobile user; using an intelligent loop distribution arrangement to bring the user´s connection always back to their `home´ service logic area; and using an AIN to provide a limited, but ubiquitous, set of call processing features to users