56 kbit/s line
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A 56 kbit/s line is a digital connection capable of carrying 56 kilobits per second (kbit/s), or 56,000 bit/s, the data rate of a normal single channel digital telephone line in North America. With the wide deployment of faster, cheaper, technologies such as ADSL and SDSL, 56 kbit/s lines are generally considered to be an obsolete technology.
The figure of 56 kbit/s is derived from its implementation using the same digital infrastructure used since the 1960s for digital telephony in the PSTN, which uses a PCM sampling rate of 8,000 Hz used with 8-bit sample encoding to encode analogue signals into a digital stream of 64,000 bit/s.
However, in the T-carrier systems used in the U.S. and Canada, a technique called bit-robbing uses, in every sixth frame, the least significant bit in the time slot associated with the voice channel for Channel Associated Signaling (CAS). This effectively renders the lowest bit of the 8 speech bits unusable for data transmission, and so a 56 kbit/s line used only 7 of the 8 data bits in each sample period to send data, thus giving a data rate of 8000 Hz × 7 bits = 56 kbit/s.
This rate has nothing directly to do with modem rates over an analog telephone line, other than that they both represent a performance just short of 64 kbit/s: a 56 kbit/s line is a purely digital link.
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This article was originally based on material from the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, which is licensed under the GFDL.
