US Patent Issued to CenturyLink Intellectual Property on March 25 for "Out-of-band communications for customer premises equipment" (Virginia Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 26 -- United States Patent no. 12,261,752, issued on March 25, was assigned to CenturyLink Intellectual Property LLC (Denver).

"Out-of-band communications for customer premises equipment" was invented by John R. B. Woodworth (Amissville, Va.) and Dean Ballew (Sterling, Va.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Customer premises equipment, such as a gateway device, for making a connection to an Internet service provider (ISP) may on occasion be defective or improperly set up, and in such circumstances remote troubleshooting by a technician employed by the Internet service provider may be hampered by the absence of a connection to the customer premises equipment. As such, a syst...