Appeal No. 2001-1185
Application No. 08/915,597 Page 6
7) that the examiner has failed to provide any motivation for
combining the references.
Beginning with the first issue, the examiner's position
(answer, pages 14 and 15) is that:
1) Sowles discloses that the assignment of the
subscriber unit to the home SIM (28) is permanent,
as disclosed at column 11, line 67 through column 12,
line 1; 2) The home SIM (28), more specifically the
gateway (30), is connected to the PSTN for use by various
subscriber units, as exhibited in FIG. 1. Based on these
two reasons it can be concluded that the home SIM (28),
more specifically the gateway (30), still acts as a
gateway to the PSTN even though the home SIM has
selected and instructed another gateway (30) to
communicate with the subscriber unit (24). Since
any communication to the subscriber unit is directed
through its home SIM and since the home SIM continues
to communicate with all subscriber units that it is
responsible for, the examiner maintains that the home
SIM still acts a gateway to the PSTN.
From our review of Sowles, we find that Sowles discloses a
radio communications system 10 which includes a plurality of
satellites 14 (figure 1). Switching Offices (SOs) 16 reside on
the surface of the earth and are in communication with the
satellites. An SO may direct communications with any region of
the earth, but each SO preferably associates with one or more
countries. SOs couple to public switched telecommunications
networks (PSTNs) (col. 2, line 65 - col. 3, line 10). SOs
perform circuit switching and control call setup, call record
keeping, call knockdown and other management functions (col. 3,
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