Methods and network nodes are provided which are adapted to perform protection
switching on the basis of raw signal quality information, such as raw BER information,
in a manner which instigates the protection switching before an actual failure
has occurred. In some embodiments, these methods leverage forward error correction
and uncorrected BER to effect traffic redirection before faults are observed at
layer 2 and above. This is as opposed to the method of switching layer 2
traffic in response to bitstream characteristics observed at that layer.
