Measuring outages in telecommunications switched networks

The actions taken by end-users, service providers, standards bodies, and government and regulators agencies relating to network reliability and service outages are reviewed. End-to-end customer perceivable characteristics of network reliability and network outages are identified. The traditional definition of reliability is extended to include reliability of a telecommunication network and services. The fundamental concepts of network reliability are formulated. Network outages are defined and a framework for measuring network outages is presented. This framework is applied to the circuit switched network.<>