The official definition of a hurricane is winds in excess of 5 km/hr for a duration of at least 1 hour. Read all about it at http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/displayNew.pl?/metcalfe/metcalfe.htm Now there is a germ of a good idea here. How about defining a standard terminology for outage events that could be used in a daily Internet weather report. Something that is a little more representative of reality, i.e. in a hurricane all human activity pretty well ceases outside of a small portion of your own home. This would, of course, require an integrated reporting system whereby all NSP's report outages, flaps, etc. to a centralised info gathering place which can then graph them, analyse them, categorize them and pulverise them. Michael Dillon ISP & Internet Consulting Memra Software Inc. Fax: +1-604-546-3049 http://www.memra.com E-mail: michael@memra.com