The FCC should consider revising its Part 4 wireless outage...
The FCC should consider revising its Part 4 wireless outage reporting requirements associated with planned outages to provide a clearer picture of an outage’s customer impact, said the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS) in a bulletin (http://xrl.us/boaxmv). An ATIS…
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group studied the FCC’s wireless outage data collected between January 2010 and July 2012. The analysis indicated maintenance-related outages were the “number one” outage cause across the industry, and that 88 percent of those outages were planned in advance, ATIS said. As customer demand and technology upgrades increase, so will the need for planned outages, the group said. “One option would be to reduce the number of subscribers reported as affected by the outage,” ATIS said in the bulletin. “This could be accomplished by reducing the concentration ratio which would give a truer picture of the actual impact of the outage.” Providers already select a maintenance window based on measured traffic to reduce subscriber impact, ATIS said. Providers also need to take “all reasonable steps” to reduce the impact and duration of planned outages; 24 percent of the planned outages were associated with a procedural or human error, ATIS said. The second-largest outage cause was hardware failure, though ATIS noted that no one specific equipment type was the main problem in those cases. Providers can reduce that type of outage by reviewing and expanding their implementation of ATIS best practices, the group said Tuesday in a news release.