Sprint issued a press release today announcing it had the fewest FCC reportable outages in 2000. http://www3.sprint.com/PR/CDA/PR_CDA_Press_Releases_Detail/1,1694,2203,00.ht... While my arithmetic doesn't exactly agree with Sprint's, Sprint did do an admirable job delivering service last year. The FCC reporting guidelines tend to impact carriers with LEC operations more than IXC operations, so you can't directly compare carriers on the aggregate numbers. And the thresholds don't show how well a carrier serves an individual customer. I did find the cover letter on the FCC outage report 00-018 interesting. Apparently there was some debate whether "inter-provider congestion" should be considered a reportable outage. I liked the comment that this was the first time this type of impairment has ever occured in Sprint's network. http://www.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Engineering_Technology/Filings/Network_Outage/200... In the end, the FCC had a more expansive definition of outage, which includes inter-provider congestion.