Patent ID: 7240245

Claim:
A method of operating a fault management system for a communications network comprising an underground section and an over-ground section, said communications network including a switch and an access network of one or more terminating circuits connecting said switch to terminal equipment provided for users of the communications network, each of said terminating circuits passing through at least one node between said switch and its respective terminal equipment, said method comprising: performing a circuit test on each circuit of at least a subset of said terminating circuits and to produce a test result for each circuit so tested, each test result comprising at least one element of test data; comparing at least one element of the test data for each circuit against a set of parameters which define a characteristic of circuits that may become faulty within a predetermined time period; if each element falls within the parameters, classifying the associated circuit as having a possibility of becoming faulty within the predetermined period; and determining a probability for each classified circuit becoming faulty within a predetermined time period; wherein the probability of each of the circuits becoming faulty comprises an element indicating the probability of a fault occurring in the underground section of the network and an element indicating the probability of the fault occurring in the over-ground section of the network; in which the two elements indicating probability are combined to calculate whether the fault is most likely to occur in the over-ground or the underground section of the network.