Telecommunications service providers are increasingly relying on third party applications developed in accordance with industry standard application programming interfaces (API's). In order to decouple the connection between the standard API's and the telecommunications network, the present invention creates a translation layer or open services gateway (OSG). The open services gateway enables an application written to conform to an industry standard API to be used despite changes in the underlying network. The OSG encapsulates the commands from the API's in a TCP/IP packet which is formatted in accordance with a generic data interface specification for an intelligent network services control point. In this manner there is no hard-coded coupling between open standard API's and the telecommunications network. Additionally, the intelligent network services control point can perform important interference monitoring functions.