This Recommendation specifies those equipment management function (EMF) requirements that are common to multiple transport technologies. Eventually this Recommendation will include all the common management functions. This Recommendation specifies the capabilities required no matter what technology and where there are differences in requirements for a given feature between technologies, the requirements will be specified in the technology-specific Recommendation. See Appendix I for an overview of common and technology-specific Recommendations. A future version of this Recommendation will elaborate on specific requirements within a given capability.

It must be noted that for a network element (NE) it is not mandatory to support all described applications, and consequently not all specified functions. Depending on the position in the network, the NE may support a subset of the functions. Packages with subsets of these functions can be found in the technology-specific Recommendations.