Sprint offering router-to-router SLAs for Global MPLS VPN service

Sprint Thursday announced that it is now offering customers end-to-end service-level agreements over its global MPLS VPN service while also expanding the reach of its MPLS backbone.

The carrier says it is now offering a standard SLA for its Global MPLS VPN service. The SLA guarantees network availability, minimum packet loss, jitter and delay from local loop to local loop.

Previously Sprint only offered network average guarantees from provider edge to provider edge.

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Sprint Thursday announced that it is now offering customers end-to-end service-level agreements over its global MPLS VPN service while also expanding the reach of its MPLS backbone.

The carrier says it is now offering a standard SLA for its Global MPLS VPN service. The SLA guarantees network availability, minimum packet loss, jitter and delay from local loop to local loop.

Previously Sprint only offered network average guarantees from provider edge to provider edge.

The SLA offers a 100% network availability guarantee for customers that have redundant SONET access. Customers that have redundant provider edge redundancy are offered a 99.95% network availability guarantee.

Sprint’s standard SLA also states customers will not experience more than 0.1% of packet loss from end-to-end. And that customers will not experience more than 10 ms of jitter one way, across their Global MPLS VPN service. Sprint says the minimum delay guarantee varies from customer to customer.

If Sprint misses any of its guarantees, customers receive a three-day service credit based on their monthly reoccurring charge for ports and local loops.

The credits are not proactive. Customers must contact Sprint in order to receive credits.

These SLA’s also only apply to customers that are directly connected to Sprint’s Global MPLS network. If customers are coming through a partner network, such as Rogers Communications in Canada, they do not get the same performance gurantees, SLAs over partner networks vary.

Sprint is also expanding the geographic reach of its MPLS network by setting up network-to-network interfaces (NNI) with other carrier’s MPLS backbones around the world.

The first NNI is with Canadian service provider Rogers Communications. Sprint says it will establish NNIs with carriers in Europe, Asia and South America throughout 2006.

The carrier’s MPLS network reaches 115 countries today. Sprint says it plans to expand that to 163 countries by year-end.

AT&T has also announced its MPLS network expansion. In February AT&T said it would expand the geographic reach of its MPLS network to 127 countries by year-end.