At+t Corp.

At&t Intellectual Property I, L.p.

Kerrie L Linker

Hossein Eslambolchi

Harold Jeffrey Stewart

Alexander Novokshanov

Denis Yankin

In accordance with the teachings of the present invention, a method and apparatus is presented for determining minutes of outage. Information associated with a facility hierarchy is acquired. In one embodiment, the facility hierarchy is a SONET facility hierarchy. Outage is determined for each level in the hierarchy and a correlation is performed on the outages associated with each level in the hierarchy.

SONET network outage impact measurement

An accurate method of reporting 'minutes of outage' for a SONET facility applies a set of business rules and hierarchical definitions to delete certain minutes that would otherwise be counted as 'outages'. In particular, any outage minutes reported for a network element taken out of service for &#x201c;planned maintenance&#x201d; activities are removed prior to performing the final count. Additionally, outage minutes for a &#x201c;lower level&#x201d; element (such as, for example an OC1 element) that overlap in time with outage minutes reported for a &#x201c;high level&#x201d; element are likewise removed before the count is performed. The elimination of these non-service impacting outage minutes thus results in a more accurate reporting of the actual service impact of the counted outage minutes.

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Red Bank, NJ, United States of America

Kerrie L Linker