scope:

This Technical Report replaces the work of Technical Report No. 42 for applicability with respect to NORS data.

PURPOSE

With the start of 2005, the FCC initiated a new set of service outage reporting requirements for service providers (see ET Docket 04-35, FCC 04-188, August 19, 2004). These requirements extended reporting beyond the wireline segment of the telecommunications industry to the wireless, satellite, and cable segments. In addition, they created new metric threshold requirements for reporting and identified new data items for reporting.

In 1995, Committee T1 had created Technical Report, T1.TR.42-1995, Enhanced Analysis of FCC-Reportable Service Outage Data, to aid the industry in the analysis of data contained in service outage reports to the FCC. The techniques in the report focused on the quantitative assessment of the impact of these outages and on the normalization of this impact relative to changes in network size over time. The techniques in the report were based on the FCC's outage reporting requirements prior to 2005. They were restricted to the wireline segment of the industry and are no longer relevant to the current reporting requirements.

This current Technical Report (ATIS-0100021) provides techniques for the analysis of FCC-reportable service outage data relevant to the reporting requirements the FCC initiated in 2005. The techniques focus on establishing an impact measure for an outage to replace the T1 Outage Index defined in T1.TR.42-1995. The report also provides techniques for the normalization of the impact measure relative to network change over time and describes techniques for the statistical analysis of the measure. Possible statistical techniques for using FCC-reportable service outage data prior to 2005 in analyzing trends over time in the early years of the new reporting requirements are also suggested. These techniques are provided as an aid to the telecommunications industry, including the individual reporting service providers and agencies and committees with access to the reports or data captured from the reports.