Latest outage analysis from the telephone companies

Thu Nov 19 23:02:54 UTC 1998

I stumbled across the lates telephone Network Reliability Steering Committee
report on US Telephone Network reliability.  Through June 30, 1998.

As always, they report the state of the nation to be good, stable, and
reliable.

Ok, so what everyone really wants to know.

  The number of facility outages (aka cable cuts) is increasing.

  The number of CO power problems is increasing.

  The number of Procedural Errors is increasing.

As always, these are based on reports from the field affecting at
least the minimum reportable event by the FCC.  Just because something
wasn't reported didn't mean it didn't happen.  Puerto Rico was treated
as a special case during this reporting period.

The good news

  The number of CCS outages is decreasing.  Since Illuminet didn't
  report their SS7 outage, I don't know if the report included its
  affects.

  Most events were within the 'green' zone limits established as a
  baseline in 1992-1993.  Which is a fancy way of saying there were
  a 'normal' number of outages.

Source of disruptions

    Facility failures (45%)
    CO Power (16%)
    Tandem Switch (14%)
    Local Switch (11%)
    CCS (9%)

ftp://ftp.atis.org/pub/nrsc/exam2q98.doc
-- 
Sean Donelan, Data Research Associates, Inc, St. Louis, MO
  Affiliation given for identification not representation