ame has significant implications for fault and performance management. When considering the quality of information available on the data plane, a forwarding entry is a multiplex of point-to-point connections that scales as O(N) at intermediate switches while preserving the useful OAM properties of a full mesh at the terminating backbone edge bridge. A path-terminating interface maintains fault and performance management state in proportion to the number of connected peers and is able to identify the source and path of both bearer traffic and OAM traffic on the basis of the embedded source MAC address and VLAN identifier. This is a distinct improvement on the merge example previously described, where additional information is added to the OAM frames to identify the source and actual bearer traffic is not associated with a particular source device. This implies that traffic counts and availability state can be maintained on a per-path pairwise basis and real-time correlation of performance counts is possible. The replacement of conventional flooding and MAC learning with configuration of the forwarding tables is augmented by the following additional steps to ensure that the method is robust: Any discontinuities in the forwarding tables of the switches along the intended path for the connection would normally result in packets being flooded as "unknown." In a mesh topology such behavior would almost certainly be fatal, and as such unknown flooding must be disabled for the designated VLAN identifier range. It is also disabled for both broadcast and multicast traffic. MAC learning is not required and might interfere with any form of management/ control population of the forwarding tables. Consequently, MAC learning is also disabled for the designated VLAN identifiers. There is no longer any need for a loop-free topology for the delegated VLAN identifiers, SO the spanning tree is disabled for the delegated range. This is achieved by assigning the identifiers to a Multiple Spanning Tree Instance Identifier to indicate a