The FCC made reporting mandatory because it recognized the importance of access reliability to subscribers. Now, even switch vendors such as Lucent and Nortel use this carrier-filed outage data to help monitor the reliability and availability of their switching products. Carriers report only total switch outages, not partial outages. In addition to the number of access switch lines experiencing the outage, the outage date, outage mean and median duration, and time are reported. All outage times are reported as local time.
Outages occur either because of scheduled activities or failure events.
Scheduled activities include hardware upgrades, conversion to vendor-released software updates, and new software for feature management. Service providers usually make scheduled changes during nonpeak hours of the day. Inc. All rights reserved .