This counter counts seconds in which the path carried a Severely Errored Framing condition or an Alarm Indication Signal, both indicating loss of frame alignment or receipt of an upstream all-ones alarm. A nonzero SASP on this port tells the admin the problem is specifically a framing-sync or AIS alarm condition arriving from upstream equipment, which usually means the fault lies at or before the far-end T1 source rather than locally. For example, if the far-end multiplexer loses its own timing reference, this port would show rising SASP as it keeps receiving AIS from that device even though the physical line into this device is intact.