A system for providing and managing IP telephone calls establishes separate and distinct call legs between IP-capable appliances and routers and between routers, and creates calls, changes calls, and manages telephony functions by joining and disjoining calls legs. In some instances one or more call legs disjoined from an active call are maintained as established to be joined later to other call legs to create other active calls. By managing EP calls as separate and distinct legs functions of intelligent, connection-oriented telephony networks may be simulated in IP telephony systems. The management is provided by software running on processors coupled to routers in the IP network.