In an FTTDP optical fibre network, Distribution point units are reverse powered by customer premises equipment and therefore liable to power failure. When the distribution point unit loses power it is unavailable to respond to requests for performance or metric data. A persistent manager agent functions as a proxy for the distribution point unit, gathering metric and performance data from the distribution point unit using at least one EOC channel and handling requests for performance and metric data issued from other network devices. The persistent manager can also schedule downloads of firmware and configuration data to the distribution point unit.