Hi Ray,
I believe that financial institutions bear the ultimate burden of ensuring that their operations remain 'Up.'
I'm not sure that the reporting criteria that I referred to earlier extends to "intrastate" outages on quite the same basis, since ATIS is an alliance that addresses interstate matters, primarily I believe, even though LECs sit on the committee. I could be wrong about that, but I feel that way because here in NY City there is a Mutual Assistance Plan (MAP) which is administered among competing carriers, of which there are now hundreds, but only about two dozen of them participate as facilities based entities in the restoration plan.
Maybe the answers to some of the questions you've raised can be found in the following ATIS web pages (which, oddly enough are found in a section of the ATIS web site which lists "Non-ATIS" programs and committees. Go Figure).
nric.org
The following one speaks directly to the reporting criteria:
nric.org
The following is an excerpt (executive summary) from the preceding url:
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OUTAGE REPORTING AND CUSTOMER NOTIFICATION TEAM
TECHNICAL PAPER
Raymond F. Albers, Chair, Bell Atlantic
1310 North Court House Road - 3rd Floor
Arlington, Virginia 22201
(703) 974-8006
1.0 Executive Summary
Over the past several years a number of major network outages have increased public
awareness and concern over telecommunications reliability. On April 6, 1992, the Federal
Communications Commission (FCC) began requiring telecommunications service providers 1 to
report outages of 30 minutes or more that potentially affected more than 50,000 customers [1].
This threshold was later lowered to 30,000 customers and requirements were added to report
outages affecting airports, 911 Service, nuclear power plants, major military installations, and
key government facilities [2].
To ensure a continued high level of reliability, the FCC?s Network Reliability Council
(NRC)2 recommended the formation of a Network Reliability Steering Committee (NRSC) 3 to
monitor network reliability based on major outages reported to the FCC. The NRSC issues
weekly, quarterly, and annual reports that provide detailed analyses of the outage data over
time. Probably the most beneficial service provided by the NRSC is a near real-time sharing of
outage reports filed by the affected carrier. These reports include a root cause analysis of the
event including equipment affected, software issue, etc., which allows other service providers
to learn from each event to help prevent or at least mitigate the effects of a similar occurrence
in their networks.
The FCC re-chartered the NRC to address a number of issues that many consider more
forward looking. The first NRC could have been viewed as reactive, while this NRC is more
proactive. The Outage Reporting and Customer Notification Team (referred to from this point
forward as ?Outage Team?) was asked to address two questions:
1. Assess whether other service providers (i.e., cable, satellite, and wireless) should
report outage data similar to that reported by telecommunications service providers 4 .
2. Determine whether and how customers of carriers should be informed of service
outages.
1 The FCC amended Part 63 of its rules (Section 63.100) to require that local exchange and
interexchange common carriers that operate either transmission or switching facilities promptly notify
the Commission of service outages whenever telephone services provided by their networks are
significantly disrupted.
2 The NRC is a Federal Committee organized by the FCC that provided recommendations for prevention
of public telecommunications network outages and minimization of the impact of such outages. The
recommendations are referred to as ?Best Practices.?
3 The NRSC is sponsored by the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS).
4 It was assumed that as new telecommunications service providers? networks become large, all reporting
requirements then in force should be applied.
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Despite the 1996 date that stands out on the title pages of many of these documents, the meat of what they contain was written in the 1991 through 1994 timeframe, that precarious time for historians of telecomms when the Internet was neither fully in or out of the picture, but rather is now seen in retrospect to have been on the cusp of existence as we now know it. Evidence of this exists throughout, in the almost complete absence of any mention of the Internet in any of these papers. I suspect that the 96 date prevails on so many of them due to the eventual need, once the carriers accepted the fact, to upgrade them to pdf format for loading onto the 'net. Swallow deep this time, guys. Swallow my foot. What's really scary is the fact that these arcane guidelines are still in effect today. The implications of this folly became manifest during the smurf and denial of service attacks that took place a month and half ago, when getting accurate reporting of outages was crucial in order to prevent the masking of one thing from uncovering something else. Much was written about this at the time, on the NANOG list and elsewhere.
But life goes on as usual, and I doubt seriously that anything will be changed, soon. This, despite an almost wholesale displacement of traffic and applications off of the PSTN and onto the Internet, as time goes on.
At: nric.org , one learns that Jim Crowe of LVLT is now the new chairman of the Network Reliability and Interoperability Council.
nric.org is the main index to the NRIC's publications.
And the following url contains a number of documents that speak directly to network reliability performance metrics and reporting criteria (from which the first two urls above were taken).
nric.org
FAC |
