Taking into account the gradual and slow process of replacement of their legacy telecommunications
equipment with new IP-based ones, electric utilities have been facing the challenge of keeping those
equipment items working beyond their expected life-cycle with the required availability levels. Being
unreasonable to replace those equipment elements with new ones of the same technology, it is
necessary to identify the risk they represent for the company, in order to manage the life-cycle of
those assets according to that risk. Using this approach for the typically most critical
telecommunications equipment components in the network - the SDH – a change in the maintenance
policy is proposed, to mitigate the identified risk level. The guidelines of this policy and the scope of
each one of its components are the main contributions of this paper to this common concern among
electric utilities.