One of the perpetual tasks in telecommunications over the years has been to keep up with which acronym means what in a given context. In fact, we've even used acronyms as a test to determine what a person's background is.

For instance, consider the acronym “MAC.” For a LAN-oriented person, MAC means the “Media Access Control” layer, which used to matter before the entire world migrated to Ethernet. At the same time, voice-oriented folks thought that MAC referred to “Moves, Adds, and Changes.” And, of course, there was the initial confusion occasionally as to whether ATM was a telecommunications protocol or something that gave you access to your bank account. (Regardless, it was viewed by many as a “money machine.”)

There’s almost no limit to the number of possible acronyms. For instance, for a TLA (Three Letter Acronym) there are 26 to the third power (17,576) possible combinations, while excluding the use of numbers (as in P2P). And if you go to FLA (that’s a Four Letter Acronym, not the state), there are 456,976 possible combinations.

So why in the name of MPLS must we continue to reuse the same TLAs and FLAs for different concepts?

One of the more confusing to those who watch carefully is the use of the term “SLA.” For over a decade, SLA has, with few exceptions, stood for a “Service Level Agreement.” However, we’re now seeing SLA used increasingly as a description of a part of Cisco’s IOS. But even in this case, it’s unclear whether the SLA means “Service Level Agreement” or “Service Level Agent.”

For instance, in some documents Cisco clearly defines SLA as “Agent,” such as this statement: “The node-to-node tests use the services of the Cisco IP Service Level Agent (IP SLA, formerly known as Service Assurance Agent [SAA])”

But in other places, Cisco refers to this capability as a “Service Level Agreement.”

Whether this is intentional obfuscation or simply marketing, we find this to be a bit troubling. An “Agent” can be used to monitor an Agreement. And this makes sense. But an “Agreement” is not a software capability, and referring to a part of IOS as IP-SLA meaning “Agreement” rather than “Agent” not only causes confusion, it also simply doesn’t make sense.

Two pleas…

1) To the extent that it is within your power, please make sure that your TLAs and FLAs create as much clarity as possible, and especially that they don’t make our terminology more FUBAR than it already is.
2) Please share your favorite dual-use TLAs and FLAs with us, and we’ll share with the community.

Steve Taylor is president of Distributed Networking Associates and publisher/editor-in-chief of Webtorials. Jim Metzler is vice president of Ashton, Metzler & Associates.