Why is the intelligent peripheral so stupid?

This paper surveys the current state of standardisation for the intelligent peripheral, or IP. The IP provides the 'ears and mouth' of the intelligent network. It is responsible for playing announcements to, and collecting information from callers, as required by the service logic, and as directed by the service control point. IP functions are specified by IN standards, such as ITU-T CS1-R, ETSI Core INAP and Bellcore AIN 0.2. The level of the function required of an IP by these standards is very low; it is required simply to play individual announcements, or collect single items of user input. This level of function hardly deserves to be called 'intelligent'. In our view it is beneficial to assign a higher level of function to the IP for the following reasons: (1) to enable new services to be implemented which are impossible with current standards; (2) to exploit the capabilities which are typically available on modem implementations of the IP; and (3) to make efficient use of the available signalling network bandwidth.