Abstract: A system (130) forwards a telephone call to a user. The system (130) receives a telephone call from a calling party and compares the name of the calling party to a list of names. If the calling party's name matches a name in the list, the system (130) forwards the telephone call to the user.

Abstract: A method is provided for estimating a number of digital subscriber line nodes (220, 230) required to supply, from a line supply source (200), a geographically distributed network of substantially sequentially numbered twisted pair lines with digital subscriber line service. The method comprises the steps of: storing, in number order, data entries for every twisted pair line of the network, each data entry comprising a pair number and a line length of the respective twisted pair line in relation to the line supply source (200); sorting the entries stored in the database by line length; isolating those sorted entries whose twisted pair lines have a line length greater than a predetermined maximum line length in relation to the line supply source (200); sorting the isolated entries by number; and discriminating, from the sorted isolated entries, the presence of discrete groupings of substantially contiguous entries.