Patent ID: 7330481

Claim:
A method for polling ports of a telecommunications device, the method comprising: (a) reading information from at least one of a plurality of poll registers, each of the plurality of poll registers corresponding to one of the ports and being associated with a unique identifier, wherein reading from the at least one of the plurality of poll registers comprises reading a provision bit, reading a channel bit in response to the provision bit indicating that the port corresponding to that poll register is provisioned, and reading a port count associated with another one of the plurality of poll registers in response to the channel bit indicating that the port is channelized; (b) reading, depending on the information read from the at least one poll register, a channel number representing the port to be polled from a location in channel memory determined from the unique identifier associated with the poll register from which the information is read, wherein reading the channel number further comprises reading the channel number and an associated provision bit from the location in channel memory determined from the unique identifier associated with the poll register in response to a channel bit indicating that the port is not channelized; and (c) polling the port represented by the read channel number.