ATIS Releases Outage Classification Standard

ATIS said Monday it has released the Standard Outage Classification standard (ATIS-PP-0100012.2007) identifying a high-level outage reporting process that will help reduce discrepancies in outage reporting for telecommunications vendors and service providers.

The standard eliminates the conflicting terminologies that telecommunication vendors and service providers use to classify and report outages, which can also differ from the FCC’s multiple classification systems. In accordance with the Standard Outage Classification, telecommunication companies can now use common terminology and reporting structures to collect and report data used for identifying causes of outages.

The standard uses three categories to define the outage: Cause of outage failure, such as hardware, software, cable, wireless transmission or capacity; reason for outage, which includes a primary and secondary descriptive basis; and responsibility for outage, like acts of nature, reporting service provider, government, or vendor. The category values are broad in nature, making the classification system applicable to any type of network and facilitating sorting and statistical analysis of outage causes.

The ATIS Network Reliability Steering Committee, which introduced the new standard, is a consensus-based industry committee responsible for monitoring and analyzing network reliability issues and regulatory matters.

ATIS www.atis.org