ck (Line Timed) (Line Timed) SONET Customer Premises Such as Router with POS Traditional SONET Architectures 3.2.5 SONET OAM&P OAM&P and network management are major desiderata among carriers. SONET enjoys a high degree of OAM&P support. This has the effect of reducing the operations and support expense of a carrier; such costs are typically in the 25 percent range of the entire carrier's budget. In asyn- chronous networks (that is, the DS1/DS2/DS3 portion of a network, partic- ularly when not supported by a SONET infrastructure), certain limitations exist, such as OAM&P bandwidth and information are limited. Separate operations support systems (OSSs) are used to provide maintenance functions. A separate data link network is used to connect OSSs to each NE. To address these limitations, SONET Makes OAM&P an integral part of the transmission standard by enhancing bandwidth and information for OAM&P Provides more operations-level information to simplify activities such as performance monitoring Consists of an integral data communications network Makes it easier to implement centralized OAM&P Remote provisioning and reconfiguration are vital. Because the network is continuously expanding and there are multiple vendors and types of equipment, carriers must be able to administer, monitor, provision, and con- trol the network from a central location. Although some proponents of the new Ethernet-based metropolitan area technologies advance autodiscovery and self-provisioning, these concepts remain to be fully developed for carrier-class applications. One of SONET's most attractive features to carriers is its capability to interface with diverse OSSs. Carriers use a constellation of OSSs to manage the many aspects of their operation, from order tracking and provisioning to engineering, from test and turnup to billing, and so on. An OSS can gather information from the network such as the alarm, status, and perfor- mance traps and statistics. An OSS can also perform remote testing or administration tasks. An OSS may also h