Abstract: A super-rate signal is split (213) by an inverse multiplexer (200) into plural SONET STS-1 signals for transmission over separate facilities. At the receiver (500) the plural received signals are likely to have misaligned frames and payloads within the frames. In order to realign the plural signals so that they can be properly recombined to reform the original super-rate signals, the SONET A1 and A2 framing bytes together with the H1 and H2 pointer bytes are extracted (506) and used to determine (507) from where in plural buffers (508) stored frames of each received signal should be read out so that the read out signals are properly aligned. If misalignment of greater than one frame is to be corrected, plural frames of each received signal are stored and the SONET J1 byte is used in conjunction with the framing and pointer bytes to properly align the signals.