Line card - Definition and Overview

Telecomunications

The Line Card is an electronic printed circuit board in an access network element of a telecommunication network. The function of the electronic circuits on the card is to interface the telecommunication lines (copper twisted pairs or optical fibers) coming from the subscribers and the rest of the access network element. This is known as the line terminator function.

The line card can terminates a line supporting a voice POTS service, or an ISDN service, or a DSL services, or a [FFTU] service. Some line cards are even capable of terminating more than one type of service.

Since an access network element is most of the time intended to interface many users (typically a few 1000s) it is desirable to have a the largest possible number of line terminator per card. Similarly, it is frequent to have many line cards in the same network element.

See Also

• Central office
• Digital Subscriber Line
• Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS)
• Telephone exchange