The present invention provides to a distributed restoration scheme a set of timers so that multiple senders and choosers can more fairly contend for the spare capacity of a telecommunications network. In particular, a preactivation timer would force a sender that had reserved excess spare capacity of the network for restoring its own failed links to release any unused spare capacity prior to the time that it terminates its operation, provided that it has found an alt-route or alt-routes for its failed link. An alarm validation timer and a hold off timer in the invention scheme further provide for respective validation and detection that a detected fault is not transient or intermittent in nature and that a restoration process is needed to find the alt-routes.