1.	Proposed revision of Recommendation M.24 (new M.34)

INFORMATION FOR PERFORMANCE MONITORING ON

INTERNATIONAL TRANSMISSION SYSTEMS AND EQUIPMENT

The following text is proposed to replace the first alinea of § 2.3. The text under "2.3.1 Uses of performance monitoring data," and all following text, remains unchanged.

"2.3	Monitoring strategies

In general, failures of equipment should be detected by continuous automatic performance monitoring, as opposed to monitoring or testing involving human intervention. This capability, however, implies that the performance monitor feature is built into the digital terminal system, or dedicated external performance monitor equipment is provided for each termination. An alternative to providing dedicated external performance monitor equipment is to provide remote access to protected monitor points and share external performance monitoring equipment with a number of terminal systems. This alternative of shared, but automatic monitoring is considered nearly continuous. Continuous (or nearly continuous) monitoring is often made feasible by advances in technology, and by virtue of the large number of circuits affected or jeopardized by a transmission system failure. While continuous performance monitoring capabilities built into transmission systems and terminals are clearly the preferred implementation for new systems, the concept of nearly continuous monitoring offers an efficient and cost effective means of providing automatic monitoring capabilities for existing digital systems not having the built-in capabilities. In addition, continuous (or nearly continuous) monitoring is faster, more reliable, and less labour intensive than manual monitoring strategies."