New ATIS Standard Streamlines Outage Reporting Process and Improves Companies' Ability to Minimize Outages

December 3 , 2007, Washington, DC- ATIS announced today the release of its Standard Outage Classification standard ( ATIS-0100012.2007) identifying a high-level outage reporting process that will help reduce discrepancies in outage reporting for telecommunications vendors and service providers. The ATIS Network Reliability Steering Committee (NRSC), which introduced the new standard, is a consensus-based industry committee responsible for monitoring and analyzing network reliability issues and regulatory matters.

The new Standard Outage Classification standard eliminates the conflicting terminologies that telecommunication vendors and service providers use to classify and report outages, which can also differ from the Federal Communication Commission (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 high-level system for classification introduced in the new standard uses three categories to define the outage: (1) cause of outage failure, such as hardware, software, cable, wireless transmission or capacity; (2) reason for outage, which includes a primary and secondary descriptive basis; and (3) 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.

Consistent terminology and uniformly organized data will bring further efficiency to the outage reporting and outage repair process,” said Susan Miller, President and CEO of ATIS. “The new Standard Outage Classification requirements will improve telecommunication companies’ ability to collect information used to remedy persistent problems and identify potential triggers of outages.”

The Standard OutageClassification standard is available in the ATIS Document Center at https://www.atis.org/docstore/default.aspx.

About the ATIS Network Reliability Steering Committee (NRSC)

The ATIS Network Reliability Steering Committee (NRSC) is a consensus-based industry committee that analyzes the communications industry's reporting of network outages, makes recommendations aimed at improving network reliability, distributes the results of its findings to industry, and, where applicable, refers matters to appropriate industry forums for further resolution. The NRSC also reviews regulatory developments affecting network reliability and submits consensus-developed comments on matters of common interest to NRSC members.

About ATIS

ATIS is a technical planning and standards development organization that is committed to rapidly developing and promoting technical and operations standards for the communications and related information technologies industry worldwide using a pragmatic, flexible and open approach. Participants from more than 300 communications companies are active in ATIS’ 22 industry committees and Incubator Solutions Program. www.atis.org