FCC outage reports

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1

Goldstein_William@bns.ATt.COM writes:

There IS a difference. The FCC keeps records of outages which must be
reported by the carriers.

It is worth checking these out.

I think there are some problems with how the FCC outage reports count
things, but here goes....

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
requirements (e.g. if you serve airports you have to report more
outages), some carriers report only when the must, other carriers
report anything even close to being reportable, and so on. Also,
if you know how fiber swapping works, sometimes its luck of the
draw who gets tapped when a shared right-of-way gets chopped.

For overall trend analysis the FCC outage reports serve a useful
purpose. But comparing one carrier to another is a different matter
and I'd rather they not get turned into another Boardwatch fiasco with
people manipulating their numbers.

Note: I haven't gone to FCC reading room in Washington DC and counted
the actual reports myself, these numbers are third-hand from one of
the carriers salespeople. Caveat Emptor.

2

In article <980918150644.eb48@SDG.DRA.COM>,

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.