Ex Parte Ward

Patent Trial and Appeal Board

Nov 20, 2013

11704069 (P.T.A.B. Nov. 20, 2013)

UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE
UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE
United States Patent and Trademark Office
Address: COMMISSIONER FOR PATENTS
P.O. Box 1450
Alexandria, Virginia 22313-1450
www.uspto.gov
APPLICATION NO. FILING DATE FIRST NAMED INVENTOR ATTORNEY DOCKET NO. CONFIRMATION NO.
11/704,069 02/08/2007 Jonathan Ward 20103/060256 2367
83417 7590 11/20/2013
AT&T Legal Department - HFZ
ATTN. Patent Docketing
One AT&T Way
Room 2A-207
Bedminstor, NJ 07921
EXAMINER
OBAID, FATEH M
ART UNIT PAPER NUMBER
3627
MAIL DATE DELIVERY MODE
11/20/2013 PAPER
Please find below and/or attached an Office communication concerning this application or proceeding.
The time period for reply, if any, is set in the attached communication.
PTOL-90A (Rev. 04/07)

UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE
____________

BEFORE THE PATENT TRIAL AND APPEAL BOARD
____________

Ex parte JONATHAN WARD
____________

Appeal 2011-008902
Application 11/704,069
Technology Center 3600
____________

Before, JOSEPH A. FISCHETTI, BIBHU R. MOHANTY, and
MICHAEL W. KIM, Administrative Patent Judges.

FISCHETTI, Administrative Patent Judge.

DECISION ON APPEAL

STATEMENT OF THE CASE
Appellant seeks our review under 35 U.S.C. § 134 of the Examiner’s
final rejection of claims 1-20. We have jurisdiction under 35 U.S.C.
§ 6(b)(2002).
We reverse.
Appeal 2011-008902
Application 11/704,069

2
Claim 1, reproduced below, is representative of the subject matter on
appeal.
1. A method for inventorying circuits, the method
comprising:
calculating a facility requirement value corresponding to
a required number of service pairs required to serve a location
with a predetermined service quality;
determining that an available plurality of service pairs
equal to the facility requirement value are available to the
location;
creating a circuit tag corresponding to the available
plurality of service pairs;
creating a plurality of service tags, each of the plurality
of service tags respectively corresponding to each of the
available plurality of service pairs, the plurality of service tags
being sequential and including the circuit tag; and
storing the circuit tag and the plurality of the service tags
in an inventory database.

THE REJECTIONS
The Examiner relies upon the following as evidence of
unpatentability:
Dodson US 6,091,735 July 18, 2000
Ishii US 2006/0181420 A1 Aug. 17, 2006
Corley US 2006/0215636 A1 Sept. 28, 2006

The following rejections are before us for review.
The Examiner rejected claims 1-3, 5-15, and 17-20 under 35 U.S.C.
Appeal 2011-008902
Application 11/704,069

3
§ 103(a) as being unpatentable over Dodson in view of Ishii. (Ans. 3-7).
The Examiner rejected claims 4 and 16 under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) as
being unpatentable over Dodson in view of Ishii and in further view of
Corley. (Ans. 7-8).

ANALYSIS
Each of independent claims 1, 14, and 18 require, in one form or
another. “calculating a facility requirement value corresponding to a
required number of service pairs required to serve a location with a
predetermined service quality” (emphasis added).
As to this limitation, the Examiner found that Dodson “explain[s] the
circuit identifiers and the service entitlements to establish the service orders
[sic] that is required number of services pairs in 3:23-52 ‘FIG. 2 is a flow
diagram showing how the relationship between the customer and the
customer service entitlements is established.’” (Ans. 9).
Appellant argues, however, that in Dodson, “the process depicted in
FIG. 3 determines whether the customer has the requisite permission for the
service” and “is not concerned with calculating a facility requirement value,
or any value corresponding to a required number of service pairs.” (App.
Br. 14).
We agree with Appellant because we find that in Dodson, the process
starts with an already existing number of ports and circuits appurtenant to
each port, such that “the network provisioning and maintenance
management system software package detects that a port has been enabled.”
Appeal 2011-008902
Application 11/704,069

4
Thus, while these existing circuits are enabled and identified by the process
in Dodson, there is no disclosure of calculating a facility requirement value
corresponding to a required number of service pairs required to serve a
location with a predetermined service quality tied to the number of ports
with their associated circuits. This is confirmed in Dodson:
The process starts after a customer is connected to a port at a
remote node and the network provisioning and maintenance
management system software package detects that a port has
been enabled. The network provider first establishes a unique
circuit identification for each port 30. Since there is one or
more ports per customer, the circuit identification is unique to
each port. The network provider then sends the circuit
identifications and customer names to the service providers 32.
Dodson, col. 3, ll.25-33. We thus disagree with the Examiner (Ans. 10) that
the assigning of an already known circuit requirement to known ports
constitutes the calculation of the requirement. Moreover, the Examiner has
not explained why a person with ordinary skill in the art would have known
to use calculating a facility requirement value corresponding to a required
number of service pairs required to serve a location with a predetermined
service quality, as the method by which the port assignments are made.
Accordingly, we do not sustain the rejection of the independent claims
1, 14, and 18 under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a). Claims 2-13, 15-17, 19, and 20
depend from one of claims 1, 14, and 18 and because we do not sustain the
rejection of claims 1, 14, and 18, the rejection of the dependent claims
likewise cannot be sustained.
We reverse the Examiner’s decision rejecting claims 1-20 under
Appeal 2011-008902
Application 11/704,069

5
35 U.S.C. § 103(a).

REVERSED

llw