The Network Reliability and Interoperability Council met today at the FCC. I thought I would review a few highlights from the 4th Quarter 1998 Network Reliability Steering Committee report. http://www.atis.org/ No it wasn't just your imagination, the last three months of 1998 were worse than normal. - 4Q98 had more outages than any prior fourth quarter - The aggregate outage index was significantly higher, and second highest on record - The number of switch outages was significantly higher - More CO power outages were reported than any other fourth quater - Procedural Error outages were in the "red" region of the NRSC control chart - There is a significant increasing trened in both the number of facility outages, and the number of CO power outages - There is an increasing trend in DACS outages, close to being statistically significant - There is an significant increasing trend in both the frequency and impact of Procedural Errors as the root cause of outages Good news, the number of SS7 CCS outages continues to decline. The mean time between outages was 2.0 days, and the median outage duration was 3.3 hours. This is only based on those outages reported to the FCC. As most of you know I have a continuing problem with the definition of a reportable outage, particular as they affect digital/data services. -- Sean Donelan, Data Research Associates, Inc, St. Louis, MO Affiliation given for identification not representation