Appeal No. 2001-1851
Application No. 08/815,363
Claims 1-29 and 31 stand rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103 as being unpatentable
over Sistanizadeh and Norris.
We refer to the Final Rejection (Paper No. 7) and the Examiner's Answer (Paper
No. 16) for a statement of the examiner’s position and to the Brief (Paper No. 15) and
the Reply Brief (Paper No. 17) for appellants’ position with respect to the claims which
stand rejected.
OPINION
Appellants point out (Brief at 5) that claim 1 requires that the access server be
connected to the premises terminal via a switched path through the central office
switching system in response to a dial-up call from a terminal. Appellants contend that
it would not have been obvious to modify the Sistanizadeh system to implement a dial-
up connection to the data network. In particular, appellants allege that the modification
proposed by the rejection would destroy the purpose of the Sistanizadeh system,
relying on express teachings of the reference. (Reply Brief at 2-3.)
We find that Sistanizadeh discloses that the invention is directed to meeting
bandwidth requirements much greater than those of conventional dial-up modems.
See, e.g., col. 2, l. 65 - col. 3, l. 55; col. 4, ll. 5-9; col. 6, ll. 37-44. Further, the reference
expresses recognition that most home computers at the time connected to public
networks via a dial-up or an ISDN line. Col. 18, ll. 35-43. Yet, the inventors did not
disclose any integration of the existing dial-up modems into their system.
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