(
Intelligent
Network) The public switched telephone network architecture of the 1990s, which was developed by Bellcore and the ITU. Bellcore later became iconectiv, an American subsidiary of Ericsson. The Intelligent Network was created to provide a variety of advanced telephony services such as 800 number translation, local number portability (LNP), call forwarding, call screening and wireless integration. While Bellcore named its version AIN (Advanced Intelligent Network) for use in North America, there are a variety of proprietary versions throughout the world based on the ITU standard.
The IN uses the SS7 signaling protocol in which voice calls (or modem data) travel through circuit-switched voice switches, while control signals travel over an SS7 packet-switched network. See
SS7 and
converged network.