ABSTRACT
Regulatory and public policymakers have become increasingly concerned about the current and future reliability of the public-switched telecommunications network. Part of this concern is driven by the worry that the cost-efficiency incentives contained in price caps and other regulation reforms may cause networks to reduce their costs in ways that also reduce the reliability of the network. A second source of concern is more immediate and is sparked by the number of recent and widely reported outages affecting major U.S. telecommunications carriers. The third is the interest in ensuring that a modem communications infrastructure exists that can reliability serve the new and emerging needs of an information-age economy. However, reliability issues have not enjoyed the same level of attention that pricing, costing, and market structure have received from regulators, policymakers, and academic researchers. Accordingly, a widespread consensus on how to define, measure, price, or resolve network reliability is lacking.
