Patent ID: 7564849

Claim:
A system comprising: an equipment to provide a service to subscribers over a plurality of digital subscriber lines (DSLs), said equipment comprising: an optical to electrical converter connected to a SONET trunk to receive SONET frames; extraction logic operatively coupled to the optical to electrical converter to locate a particular byte location of a byte inserted in unused overhead of at least one of said received SONET frames and capture a byte value from said particular byte location, wherein the byte inserted into the unused overhead was inserted from a signaling channel of a plurality of signaling channels into said unused overhead by locating an unused byte location by switching to an interface buffer storing byte values in response to an availability of said unused byte location to be written, said interface buffer comprising one of a plurality of interface buffers associated corresponding with a plurality of signaling channels, said plurality of interface buffers being switched to match said plurality of signaling channels to associated byte locations at a data rate of a SONET service comprising the at least one of said received SONET frames; and a demultiplexer operatively coupled to the extraction logic to forward portions of said SONET frames to said subscribers over said DSLs.