A line card or digital line card is a modular electronic circuit on a printed circuit board that interfaces with a telecommunications access network.
A line card typically interfaces the twisted pair cable of a POTS local loop to the public switched telephone network (PSTN). Telephone line cards perform multiple tasks, such as analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog conversion of voice, off-hook detection, ring supervision, line integrity tests, and other BORSCHT functions. In some telephone exchange designs, the line cards generate ringing current and decode DTMF signals. The line card in a subscriber loop carrier is called a subscriber line interface card (SLIC).
A line card can terminate a line supporting voice POTS service, ISDN service, DSL service, or proprietary ones. Some line cards are capable of terminating more than one type of service.
Since an access network element is usually intended to interface many users (typically a few thousand), some exchanges have multiple line terminations per card. Likewise, one network element can have many line cards.
Famous quotes containing the words line and/or card:
“What comes over a man, is it soul or mind
That to no limits and bounds he can stay confined?
You would say his ambition was to extend the reach
Clear to the Arctic of every living kind.
Why is his nature forever so hard to teach
That though there is no fixed line between wrong and right,
There are roughly zones whose laws must be obeyed?”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“There is undoubtedly something religious about it: everyone believes that they are special, that they are chosen, that they have a special relation with fate. Here is the test: you turn over card after card to see in which way that is true. If you can defy the odds, you may be saved. And when you are cleaned out, the last penny gone, you are enlightened at last, free perhaps, exhilarated like an ascetic by the falling away of the material world.”
—Andrei Codrescu (b. 1947)