The Subteam found that 65 percent of the outage reports were “sympathy” reports, or outages reported by one or more companies that occurred as the result of problems in another company’s network, and that the leading cause of those outages was cable damage.

   The Subteam also completed an analysis of keywords mentioned in the non-sympathy reports for both direct and root causes of the outages. “This analysis identified the causal label Procedural-Service Provider-Other as the number one reason cited for outages across the industry. Further analysis of the keywords contained in the reports of these procedural outage events showed that 88 percent of them contained the words ‘planned’ or ‘maintenance,’ indicating that the outages likely occurred during a maintenance window,” ATIS wrote in the report.

   ATIS notes that as new technology is deployed and consumer demand continues to increase, more planned outages associated with equipment upgrades also may occur. “Communication providers select the maintenance window based on the measured traffic handled by the specific location in order to minimize subscriber impact. Therefore, in its bulletin ATIS recommends that the FCC consider revising its rules (47 C.F.R. Part 4) on outage reporting requirements associated with planned activity during designated maintenance windows to provide a more accurate depiction of an outage’s actual customer impact,” the report said.