scope:

Background

In the December 2015 quarterly meeting of the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS) Network Reliability Steering Committee (NRSC), the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) identified that the number of outages per month had risen dramatically. As a result of this observation, the NRSC established the Outage Increase Task Force (TF). Based on this TF's findings, the team was renamed to the DS3 Non-Simplex TF with the acceptance of NRSC Issue 33. During 2016, the NRSC DS3 TF gathered Network Outage Reporting System (NORS) data from all of the NRSC members for the period between March 2015-October 2016 and conducted extensive analysis to attempt to determine if there were any underlying actionable causes to the rise in reportable outages. This Bulletin will describe the analysis and the resulting recommendations; however, other than increased vigilance, no actionable tasks were identified.