Service Standards for Residential Phone Service ?

Edwards Finance > Phones

Q. I'm seeking information on official standards for service outage or service reliability of residential POTS as such standards may have existed in the "good old Bell System" days, and also now, if such still exist.

A. I was once told by a Bell Labs old-timer that the Bell System had a published standard that no residential customer should be without dial tone for more than 18 minutes total (cumulative) per year due to any reasons associated with the Bell System (including storm damages, etc); that conformity to this target was routinely measured and reported; and that local telco executives' performance ratings depended on part on their success in meeting performance standards like this. More recently I was told by a young engineer designing electronic equipment to provide phone service over cable TV lines that there was a similar standard he had to design to, but it was 57 minutes outage/year. Does anyone have more reliable or detailed information about this? If the numbers quoted have any reality, are they to be interpreted as *averages* over all the residential customers in a given area? Or do they mean that the design goal is that *no single customer* should be out for more than those lengths of time? (In case anyone is interested, my real target is service reliability of _electrical_ service, which in this modern era I believe needs to be at least as reliable as telephone service, and in our area definitely isn't. Our local provider, PG&E, in fact appears to have no stated quantitative standards for service reliability; and my concern is that dergulation is likely to make things worse rather than better.)

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