Patent ID: 7535923

Claim:
An apparatus, comprising: a multiport concentrator concentrating network data from different links in a network and carried on a plurality of lower speed lines into a stream of data carried on a higher speed line, the multiport concentrator comprising: a plurality of line interfaces which connect the different links in the network to the multiport concentrator, each line interface including a power meter that collects telemetry data from the network data; a field programmable gate array (FPGA) synchronizing the network data; combining the synchronized data; deframing the combined data; gathering additional telemetry data from the combined data; tagging the deframed data, the telemetry data collected by the power meters, and the additional telemetry data collected by the FPGA; and framing the tagged data, the tagged telemetry data collected by the power meters, and the tagged additional telemetry data collected by the FPGA in a SONET/SDH frame structure; a serializer serializing the framed data; and an electrical to optical module converting the serialized data into an optical signal, the optical signal being the stream of data carried on the higher speed line; and a measurement system determining network statistics from the stream of data carried by the higher speed line.