et, and to be able to quickly identify faults and take appropriate actions. Traditionally Ethernet has not provided the tools that allow the service or network provider to remotely manage the network and to achieve these goals quickly and cost effectively. In this environment it is also necessary to have tools that are provided in the Ethernet layer and do not rely on client layer technolo- gies such as IP. For this reason there has been much activity by both the IEEE and the ITU-T to develop these capabilities. Within the IEEE standards, OAM can be subdivided into OAM that operates on a physical link and that does not pass through a bridge and that provides features such as discovery (which is necessary to allow the ends of a link to communicate with each other regarding their capabilities and configuration), performance monitoring, remote loopback (to aid with installation and fault finding), fault detection, and statistics collection. This was described in 802.3ah and is also referred to as Ethernet in the First Mile. It was first published in 2004 and has since been incorporated into the 802.3 standard (IEEE 802.3, 2005a). The second form of OAM provides capabilities that can be used on a per-service basis can be passed end to end through bridges and is termed, in the language of the IEEE, Continuity Fault Management (CFM). The framework for this allows a customer service to be monitored end to end regardless of any underlying technology and also takes into account that a service may be delivered by more than one provider. Work on this was carried out in parallel between the IEEE (802.1ag) and the ITU-T (Y.1731) (IEEE 802.1ag, 2007b; ITU-T Y1731, 2006c). Although both build on many of the features that are common in point-to- point connection oriented technologies the connectionless nature of Ethernet and the need to support multipoint-to-multipoint services means that the OAM models for Ethernet are slightly different. There are some minor differences between the standards, including ter- minology regarding 