The present invention allows a terminating telephony switch to detect
whether or not a caller associated with an incoming call is associated
with multimedia capability. The terminating telephony switch will monitor
a call setup message, such as an Integrated Services User Protocol
Initial Address Message, to determine whether or not there is multimedia
capability information indicative of the caller's telephony terminal
being associated with another media device, or including media capability
sufficient to support packet sessions over a data network. The multimedia
capability information may simply be the presence or absence of a flag,
wherein the presence of a flag indicates there is multimedia capability.
Alternatively, the call setup message may include the multimedia address
associated with the media device of the caller. The originating telephony
switch is configured to create call setup messages to provide multimedia
capability information to enable the functionality of the terminating
telephony switch.