Assessing pain below a regulatory outage reporting threshold

This paper investigates a US regulatory reporting threshold dealing with telecommunication outages, and the use of a carrier industry standard in measuring the significance, or impact, of outage events. As outages below the threshold are censored, the natural question is whether important events and impact are being masked. A data set of local switch outages above and below the threshold is used as a proxy to investigate the efficacy of the reporting threshold. Key findings suggest that the current regulatory threshold masks serious communications loss, and that an industry communications loss metric distorts impact above and below the regulatory threshold.