ol. SLAs are very important in telecommunications, although it is thought that there will be a decline in SLAs and a move towards guaranteed service levels. After all, if you purchase a certain quality of service, then you want that service - you do not want credits for more of the same defective service. 10 In any case, OSS vendors in the service provisioning space have had to offer SLA management, which means that SLA breaches must be measurable. The result has been that a number of low-level functions (alarm and performance management) are sometimes seen in service management products. Service provisioning products typically span a great many functionalities, whether or not they offer SLA management. For example, the Telcordia Service Provisioning and Activation suite includes: 1. Network configuration management, which assists in making decisions regard- ing network and service configuration, as well as assisting in assigning circuits and inventory management. 2. Customer access and location management, which merges service location information with the access data network for each location. 3. Customer number management - in particular, one should consider numbers (e.g. telephone numbers, in the usual sense) as a resource which, like any resource, is allocated in the provisioning process. 4. Service delivery for real-time, flow-through order tracking and service delivery. 5. Work item management, which involves the prioritisation of work items and the assignment of work items to technicians. 6. Unified order management, from customer order through service provisioning and on to billing. 7. Hybrid fibre-coaxial cable (HFC) element management for end-to-end man- agement of HFC networks. 8. Service cutover management, allowing transition of services between access networks - particularly for service cut over from an old to a new network. 9. SS7 network activation management for network configuration, fault manage- ment, routing data and local number portability. 10. Element management - including element activa