The invention relates generally to providing a customer premise service to customers who are not easily reachable with that service from a central office or remote terminal supporting the service.
As customer premise services, such as ISDN basic rate interface service, expands substantially, it often occurs that T1, on either fiber optics or copper, extends to a remote terminal cabinet, but that the cabinet itself is operating at full capacity and does not have the additional shelf space to provide further customer premise services, such as ISDN BRI loops or service, to new or existing customers, or that the cabinets do not have three empty adjacent slots which would make it relatively easy to add, for example, additional service. As a result, either additional remote terminal cabinets must be built and integrated into the system, or the shelf must be rearranged, (moving existing subscribers to other time/physical slots thus requiring substantial labor and coordination with the central office) or the new ISDN service is not available.
The problem of providing ISDN service to remote customers is exacerbated by the continuing and increasing demand for the service itself. Thus, various new technologies either require ISDN or equivalent service, such as, for example, video conferencing, wideband data services, lottery services, etc. The telephone companies, however, while having substantial remote terminal cabinets available to them, spaced from the central office, find that those remote terminals are already full and have no additional shelf space to provide further ISDN or POTS service or requiring grooming of the cabinet. (A typical ISDN line requires three time slots on a T1 line and often requires three physical slots in the cabinet.) As a result, the telephone companies are faced with substantial capital expenses relating to the addition of further remote terminal cabinets or substantial labor costs. It is thus not a simple matter to add a remote terminal, since those cabinets are not only large and expensive, but also must be appropriately mounted and fixed for permanent use.
Accordingly, the invention provides a method and apparatus for advantageously increasing the capacity of remote terminal cabinets even though, at first blush, the cabinets appear to already be full or otherwise not able to provide the card slots needed to provide such service. Other objects of the invention are an economical and practical method and apparatus for increasing the ISDN capability of a remote cabinet without sacrificing or reducing any other service being provided by the remote cabinet.