Method and apparatus for quantifying the customer impact of cell tower outages

A computer-readable storage device storing a plurality of instructions, which when executed by a processor, cause the processor to perform operations for quantifying a total number of customers impacted by a cellular tower outage, the operations comprising:

• monitoring a plurality of cellular towers;
• detecting a failure of one of the plurality of cellular towers;
• identifying a subset of the plurality of cellular towers that are included in an affected region, wherein the subset of the plurality of cellular towers comprises a cellular tower having a statistically significant change in a number of customers that is served by the cellular tower, wherein the statistically significant change comprises:
• obtaining an observation of a number of customers over a period of time;
• identifying a noise component of the observation of the number of customers over the period of time by removing a seasonal trend from the observation of the number of customers over the period of time;
• and
• determining that the noise component is above a threshold;
• calculating a number of additional customers served by each one of the subset of the plurality of cellular towers that are included in the affected region due to the failure of the one cellular tower;
• and
• quantifying the total number of customers impacted by the failure of the one cellular tower by adding the number of additional customers served by the each one of the subset of the plurality of cellular towers that are included in the affected region.

An apparatus for quantifying a total number of customers impacted by a cellular tower outage, the apparatus comprising:

• a processor;
• and
• a computer-readable storage device storing a plurality of instructions which, when executed by the processor, cause the processor to perform operations, the operations comprising:
• monitoring a plurality of cellular towers;
• detecting a failure of one of the plurality of cellular towers;
• identifying a subset of the plurality of cellular towers that are included in an affected region, wherein the subset of the plurality of cellular towers comprises a cellular tower having a statistically significant change in a number of customers that is served by the cellular tower, wherein the statistically significant change comprises:
• obtaining an observation of a number of customers over a period of time;
• identifying a noise component of the observation of the number of customers over the period of time by removing a seasonal trend from the observation of the number of customers over the period of time;
• and
• determining that the noise component is above a threshold;
• calculating a number of additional customers served by each one of the subset of the plurality of cellular towers that are included in the affected region due to the failure of the one cellular tower;
• and
• quantifying the total number of customers impacted by the failure of the one cellular tower by adding the number of additional customers served by the each one of the subset of the plurality of cellular towers that are included in the affected region.