Abstract: A preferred embodiment of the present invention is disclosed to include a router system having a trunk feature card and at least one modem feature card for transferring communication information between the modem feature cards through a TDM backplane, to the trunk card, for transfer thereof to Digital Subscriber (DS) lines, the router and modem cards while co-existing within the same router system, having no knowledge of the characteristics of each other with many different combinations of such trunk and modem cards being employed by the router system. The router system accommodating “over-subscription” situations wherein the number of DS lines is less than the number of modems and initialization the system such as to maximize the utility of the DS lines as a function of the type of modem cards in the system.