Patent ID: 7440694

Claim:
A method of generating an outage report comprising an accurate count of outage minutes during a predetermined time period in a Synchronous Optical NETwork (SONET) facility, the method comprising the steps of: a) defining a SONET network transport hierarchy including at least one high level and at least one low level, the at least one high level transmitting at a higher data rate that the at least one low level; b) plotting a timeline for each transport element, indicating planned maintenance outages and all actual outages; c) determining, for each timeline, the existence of any time overlaps between planned maintenance outages and actual outages; d) removing overlap outage minutes determined in step c), if any; e) determining, across all timeliness, the existence of any outage overlaps between the at least one high level and the at least one low level; f) removing overlap outage minutes from the at least one low level, if any; and g) totaling all remaining outage minutes from each level; and h) generating an outage report including the total created in step g).