Dedicated Internet access SLAs ... again
 
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Due to a notable amount of e-mail that I received from newsletter readers last week, I feel I need to clarify an issue regarding service-level agreements.
Cable & Wireless announced a new SLA for its DirectConnect dedicated Internet access service that states: customers will not experience more than 70 msec worth of latency on average, across Cable & Wireless' Internet backbone during any given month.
I called this a minimum latency guarantee. However, the SLA is not guaranteeing users will experience a minimum of 70 msec worth of latency. The SLA is guaranteeing that users will experience no more than 70 msec worth of latency.
Several faithful readers e-mailed me last week saying that Cable & Wireless should try offering a maximum latency guarantee. But that is also misleading. Cable & Wireless, GTE Internetworking, UUNET and PSINet are actually not guaranteeing that their customers will experience at least 70 msec of latency, which is what a maximum latency guarantee is saying.
So from this point on I will not use either term when trying to describe an ISP's SLA. But now that we've got that out of the way, why is it that Cable & Wireless isn't making its new performance SLAs automatically available to all of its existing dedicated Internet access customers?
Read our next newsletter, which addresses that very issue.
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Denise Pappalardo is a senior editor for Network World, covering ISPs, VPNs and related topics. Reach her at denisep@nww.com.
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