Availability Incidents in the Telecommunication Domain: A Literature Review

Non-availability incidents in public telecom services may have a wide-spread impact, such as disruption of internet services, mobile services, and land-line communication. This, in turn, may disrupt the life of consumers and citizens, and the provision of services by commercial and public organizations. These incidents are always analyzed and solved by the provider. In Europe, there is a legal obligation to report the analysis and solution of the incident to the national telecom regulator. However, these reports are highly confidential, and beyond some elementary descriptive statistics, they are not analyzed. This means that a significant opportunity is missed to draw lessons from these incidents, which could be valuable to other providers and to standardization bodies. In the LINC project, we aim to develop a method to draw lessons learned from registered non-availability incidents without compromising the confidentiality of those registrations. As a preparation for that, we have conducted a systematic literature review of non-availability incidents in public telecom services reported in the scientific and professional literature, to see what we can learn from the reported incident model and analysis methods used. In this report, we present an incident analysis taxonomy to establish a common terminological ground among researchers and practitioners.