In article <980918150644.eb48@SDG.DRA.COM>, Sean Donelan <SEAN@SDG.DRA.COM> wrote:

FCC outage reports by year and inter-exchange carrier

1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 AT&T 3 15 7 18 17 MCI 13 12 19 9 15 Sprint 3 11 3 12 9 WorldCom NA NA NA 7 13

There are all sorts of normalization problems, different reporting [...]

You'd also want to look at more than just the count of outage reports; the size of the outages matters, the total size of the network, and the MTTR. If you "had to" distill it to a single number I suppose percentage uptime is the one to use. I'm not sure fiber cuts are common enough to make a meaningful statement about the reliability of one carrier vs. another. -- Shields, CrossLink.