FCC outage filings

Sean Donelan SEAN at SDG.DRA.COM
Wed Oct 7 22:06:55 UTC 1998


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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