Is there life after bit error rate or before?

This paper considers some little discussed basic aspects of bit error probability and bit error rate in the context of spread spectrum shift keying binary communication systems. It points out that bit error rate is an average of bit error probability and suggests further ways of using the distribution of bit error probability to give alternative and complementary measures of performance of binary communication systems. One of these is a probability interval measure and two others capture the idea of outage. Illustrations are given using the extremes of spreading choices, namely independent Gaussian random variables and chaotic dependent random variables