Providing capability for increasing, decreasing, or changing types of bandwidth associated with a telecommunication call during the call and through out the call path. New messages can allocate or deallocate bandwidth associated with the call at each intervening switching node through out the call path. All switching nodes of a switching system involved with the resulting call consider the call as a single call. The new messages allow adding video capability to a voice call and, at a still later point in time, removing the video capability from the call. The result is convenience to telecommunication users in that the user is able to utilize any type or amount of bandwidth during a multimedia call. Yet, at any given point in time, the user pays only for the bandwidth that is being utilized.