I'm in Washington DC this week, so I decided to go down to the FCC and read the carrier outage reports myself. As I mentioned before, the outage reporting requirements are aimed mostly at local exchange carrier events. Therefore large LEC's tend to be over-represented in the reports. There also seems to be the usual corporate games with what gets reported and what doesn't. Here is a list of everyone who filed one ore more FCC outage reports in 1998 through Oct 5, 1998. Does it really tell you anything? Not really. For example, notice the absence of GTE and Illuminet from the list. Does this mean Illuminet and GTE were so reliable they didn't have a single outage in 1998. Or the filing requirements don't really capture today's business structures. Sometimes you find Worldcom filing an outage report about an MCI fiber cut which Worldcom was leasing some circuits, but I didn't find an equivalent filing by MCI about the fiber cut. You could really tell the confusion in the Illuminet SS7 failure which affected lots of carriers. Some other carriers filed outage reports, some withdrew their filings, others never reported anything. Because of the problems I see with who reports what, I'm not going to rank, or give counts for individual carriers. This list is in alphabetical order. alltel ameritech att bell atlantic bell south century telephone matanuska mci means pacbell pagenet puerto rico telephone qwest sbc snet sprint tcg uswest virgin islands islands worldcom It was interesting to read the reports. Anyone who has ever worked in a NOC would love some of the comments. Everyone really does go through the same stupid stuff. Here's my ranking of the most common reasons for FCC reportable outages, in order for most to least. Fiber/cable cuts Power (mostly weather related) Operator/Maintenance errors Hardware (C.O.) failures Software errors Sabotage Animal (gopher) I did find that Worldcom is getting a bit annoyed at the number of fiber cuts and service disruptions they are experiencing. In several of their most recent filings they've started identifying the responsible parties by name, e.g. Qwest, Metromedia Fiber Systems, CSX. -- Sean Donelan, Data Research Associates, Inc, St. Louis, MO Affiliation given for identification not representation
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Sean Donelan