The Intelligent Network Standards: Their Application to Services

Rating:
Summary: Heavy on the AIN standards, sketchy on the applications.
Review: This book gives a quite comprehensive roadmap and tour of the AIN standards. There are very useful reference sections and tables describing the various standards documents, what each contains, and how they relate to each other. In addition, the book contains one of the clearer descriptions of the AIN architectural concepts that I've come across. However, the book it actually a collaboration of several authors, each covering a separate area of the AIN architecture. This leads to a lack of continuity and a large variance in depth of coverage between chapters. Finally, some of the material simply regurgitates the contents of the standards themselves, providing less insight into an admittedly difficult subject than one would have hoped. But it *is* comprehensive.

Overall, a useful book. I'd recommend it for engineers and managers who need to work directly in the telephony field. Not for the casual reader who just wants to know what AIN is all about.