Abstract: According to the invention, a method and apparatus are disclosed for providing multiline telephonic and data services over a single access facility. In one embodiment of the present invention, a wall unit is located at a customer premises which terminates a single analog phone line and adaptively encodes using Voice over Internet Protocol technology and multiplexes a plurality of telephonic and data calls over the single analog phone line. A corresponding gateway server (or a plurality of gateway servers), which supports one or a plurality of wall unit calls, is located in the public switched telephone network (“PSTN”), or possibly in a private telephone network. The gateway server communicates with one or more active wall units to extract one or more telephonic and data calls from the analog signal produced from a wall unit, and to appropriately route the telephonic calls over the PSTN and the data packets over the Internet or to other data services.

Abstract: An in-service line monitoring technique to detect and isolate marginal and failed digital transmission equipment within a digital telecommunication system having at least two end terminals. At selected terminal and repeater locations, a digital error detector monitors the bit error rate for each location. The detected BER is truncated to include at least the most significant digit and the exponent of the BER. The truncated BER is stored and then encoded for transmission back to the command center usually located at an end terminal. At the one end terminal the encoded BER is stored and displayed upon request. By being able to monitor the truncated BER at any location or direction, maintenance personnel are able to determine when a link in the system is beginning to deteriorate well before a complete path failure occurs.

Abstract: In-service line monitoring apparatus to detect and isolate marginal and failed digital transmission equipment within a digital telecommunication system having at least two end terminals. At selected terminal and repeater locations, a digital error detector monitors the bit error rate for each location. The detected BER is truncated to include at least the most significant digit and the exponent of the BER. The truncated BER is stored and then encoded for transmission back to the command center usually located at an end terminal. At the one end terminal the encoded BER is stored and displayed upon request. By being able to monitor the truncated BER at any location or direction, maintenance personnel are able to determine when a link in the system begins to deteriorate well before a complete path failure occurs.