A network management system and a method are described herein that determine if one or more devices (e.g., consumer premises equipment(s)) are experiencing an unacceptable packet loss for downstream multicast traffic in an access network. In one embodiment, the network management system performs the following operations: (1) cause a trigger probe to be sent to the one or more devices, where each trigger probe contains information which causes the corresponding device to start a packet loss measurement; and (2) receive an unacceptable loss measurement message from one of the devices if that one device experienced packet losses over a certain period of time that exceeded a predetermined threshold which would be an indication that the one end device is experiencing an unacceptable packet loss.
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