Telecommunication equipment of the present invention includes a switch for receiving data from a plurality of ports and inserting a unique port identifier in the data from each port to identify the source port of the data. The equipment also includes a multiplexer coupled to the switch and operable to multiplex the data from the plurality of ports into a single serial data stream. A method of the present invention includes the steps of receiving data from a plurality of ports, adding a unique port identifier to the data from each port to identify the port from which the data came, and multiplexing the data from the plurality of ports into a single data stream for transmission.