Service-level agreements: Nothing but nonsense

If you think the service-level agreement you have with your ISP means something, think again. Read through the fine print and you'll discover the SLA contains a whole lot of PR and not much substance.

Major ISPs, such as AT&T, PSINet and UUNET, offer SLAs to some of their customers. SLAs have two parts: the service, which may include guarantees on availability, latency, support, throughput and even security; and the penalty.

Let's start with the penalty. I have yet to see a penalty that gives the carrier a proper slap in the face. In fact, some of the first SLAs I saw were positively laughable: If your Internet connection is down for an hour, then you don't have to pay for that hour. Now some SLAs offer a bigger bonus: If your service is down for an hour, you don't have to pay for that day.

Well, if a business-critical service is cut off for an hour, I don't see why I should pay for the entire month. Remember, people go to the AT&Ts and PSINets of the world because they want big-company performance. If you're paying the big guys two to three times the going rate for Internet service, you deserve to have it running 24 hours a day.

The whole point of an SLA is to provide some incentive for the carrier to do a good job. If a multihour outage only costs the carrier a couple hundred bucks, then we're going to keep seeing multihour outages.

But when the potential cost for downtime starts at thousands of dollars and goes up from there, the people making decisions about equipment and engineering are going to take their jobs a lot more seriously - and have a better argument for getting more cash out of the bean counters to improve the infrastructure and support team.

But let's back up. The real problem with SLAs is the definition of service. UUNET has made great hay with its SLA, so I'll pick on it for a bit - even though UUNET is not the worst offender.

What UUNET calls an SLA is really just a description of the service you've bought and paid for, with UUNET essentially promising to run its network as best it can. That's easy. The hard part of being an ISP is dealing with end-to-end problems. And that's where UUNET's SLA and all the others leave me in the lurch. Try calling UUNET's help desk and say you're having problems connecting to, say, CERFnet. Most likely, the help desk will dodge responsibility: "Oh, that's a problem at MAE East." "Oh, that's CERFnet." "That's a BGP problem."

Well, I don't give a damn where the carrier wants to stick the blame. If I'm paying UUNET, I expect it to act as my representative to the rest of the world and get my packets through, on time, without loss or corruption. That would be service. And friends, that's what you're not going to get, SLA or no SLA.