ATIS 0100058

This Annual Report reviews the health of the wireline telecommunications networks for the year 2002, as well as trends observed over the last ten years of outage reporting to the FCC. It was a year of challenge as the Telecommunications Industry addressed dimensions of reliability that were brought to the forefront following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack. A major focus of the Network Reliability and Interoperability Council VI (NRIC VI) is Homeland Security, and the collective effort of its members and contributors has resulted in the addition of approximately 500 new Best Practices (now 750 total) in the areas of Physical Security, Cyber Security, Public Safety, and Disaster Recovery. The criticality of the nation's communications infrastructure is highlighted as never before, and the industry's cooperation and commitment to service and reliability has never been more important.