The Regulatory Authority has posted new outage reporting procedures for TV, internet, phone service providers.The RA requires each telecoms carrier shall notify the Authority electronically, ten business days prior to any scheduled outage that is expected to exceed 30 minutes.For unscheduled outages, the RA says each telecoms carrier shall notify the Authority within 120 minutes of discovering that it has experienced, with respect to any facility that it owns, operates, leases, or otherwise utilises, an outage of at least 30 minutes.“This is mostly for carriers to keep RA informed of any outages which affect customers,” RA CEO Philip Micallef said yesterday.“It is important to customers because if RA sees that a particular carrier is for example having too many outages in a particular area, it can intervene with the carrier to ask it to find a long term solution.“For scheduled outages due to say maintenance of carrier equipment the RA knowing beforehand will ask the carrier concerned to inform the customers affected. This is to primarily improve communications and improve the level of service if needed.”The RA further says that within 120 minutes after service is restored from an outage, carriers must notify the Authority.And carriers are also required to inform the RA of the name, position, and 24X7 contact information of the person completing the notice or other responsible persons familiar with the situation; the date and time of onset of outage; a brief description of the problem; the particular services affected; and the geographic area affected by the outage.The carrier must also provide a description of the actions it has taken to correct the cause of the outage and to prevent its recurrence.