The Cisco ONS 15454 SONET 12-Port DS-3 Transmultiplexer Card provides 12 Telcordia-compliant, GR-499-CORE DS-3 C-Bit or M2/3 framed interfaces operating at 44.736 Mbps. The card demultiplexes a channelized DS-3 into 28 DS-1s, maps each DS-1 to a VT1.5, then multiplexes the 28 VT1.5s into a VT-mapped STS-1 before hand-off to the Cisco ONS 15454 cross-connect card. The integration of transmultiplexing capabilities into the Cisco ONS 15454 Multiservice Provisioning Platform (MSPP) reduces the need for outboard M13 multiplexers or wideband digital cross-connect systems to access and groom DS-1 signals from channelized DS-3 interfaces. The 12-port DS-3 transmultiplexer card offers grooming flexibility by supporting two ways to receive the DS-3 signal, ported or portless. Ported terminations refer to DS-3 interfaces that are received through 75-ohm coaxial cables from the shelf assembly's electrical interface adapter (EIA) panels. Portless termination is a channelized DS-3 signal received over an STS-1 circuit from a SONET optical line (OC-n). The portless capability eliminates the need to terminate a channelized DS-3 signal on the shelf assembly and then re-insert.