
Sprint issued a press release today announcing it had the fewest
FCC reportable outages in 2000.

http://www3.sprint.com/PR/CDA/PR_CDA_Press_Releases_Detail/1,1694,2203,00.html

While my arithmetic doesn't exactly agree with Sprint's, Sprint did do an
admirable job delivering service last year.  The FCC reporting guidelines
tend to impact carriers with LEC operations more than IXC operations, so
you can't directly compare carriers on the aggregate numbers.  And the
thresholds don't show how well a carrier serves an individual customer.

I did find the cover letter on the FCC outage report 00-018 interesting.
Apparently there was some debate whether "inter-provider congestion"
should be considered a reportable outage.  I liked the comment that
this was the first time this type of impairment has ever occured in
Sprint's network.

http://www.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Engineering_Technology/Filings/Network_Outage/2000/reports/00-018.pdf

In the end, the FCC had a more expansive definition of outage, which includes
inter-provider congestion.




