Abstract: In a personal reach telephone service in which a calling party's telephone call to a personal reach telephone number of a called party is bridged to a return call placed by the called party in response to a page, a connection is established between bridging and signaling equipment associated with the interexchange network, to which the calling party's call is directed, and the home PBX associated with the called party. The called party, in responding to the page, and if local to the PBX, calls into his home PBX where this return call and the calling party's call are bridged together.

Abstract: In a noisy environment, e.g., a car traveling down the road with the radio playing, a user who prefers that his pager provide him with an audible alert in response to an actuation of the pager may not be able to hear such an audible alert supplied by the pager. To overcome this difficulty, a pager that is set to an audible alert mode is arranged to change its alerting for a particular actuation of the pager from audible to tactile only when the ambient sound level of the environment in which the pager is located is greater than a predetermined threshold level. For each actuation of the pager that the ambient sound level in the environment in which the pager is located is less than the predetermined threshold level, the pager alerts audibly. Optionally, if the pager also determines that it is no longer being worn on the person of a user, the pager alerts audibly regardless of whether the ambient sound level is greater than the predetermined threshold level.