Remote concentrator

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In modern telephony a remote concentrator, remote concentrator unit (RCU), or remote line concentrator (RLC) is a concentrator at the lowest level in the telephone switch hierarchy.

Subscribers' analogue telephone/PSTN lines are terminated on concentrators. They have three main functions:

• Digitize: convert voice (and sometimes data) from analogue to a digital form.
• Connect off-hook lines to the local exchange—the concentration function.
• Multiplex, interleaving many calls together on a single wire or optical fiber.^[1]

Only a few hundred telephone lines attach to each remote concentrator. In North America concentrators are located in a serving area interface (SAI) or other enclosure in each neighborhood. In Europe the buildings which once contained local Strowger switch telephone exchanges are now usually empty except for a remote concentrator.^{[citation needed]}

Only call packets from or destined to a phone serviced by the concentrator actually are processed by the concentrator; nonlocal phones' time slots just pass through the concentrator unchanged. If the concentrator malfunctions, a fail-safe relay connects the "in" wires to the "out" wires, and nonlocal phones detect no difference. The central switch periodically counts concentrators, and schedules maintenance, probably before users notice the failure. Concentrators for several hundred customers can be threaded on this loop like pearls.

The interface between remote concentrators and their parent telephone switches has been standardised by ETSI as the V5 interface.