MCI is improving its Managed LAN service-level agreements by offering customers better repair time and availability guarantees.
The carrier says it guarantees it will repair a Managed LAN service outage within 3½ hours in the U.S. Previously, MCI offered customers a four-hour repair guarantee.
“MCI’s SLAs are unique because all of the SLAs are generally available,” says Melanie Posey, an analyst at IDC. “A lot of other service providers offer these types of guarantees, but more on a case-by-case basis.”
Earlier this year, MCI announced similar SLAs for its Managed WAN services. Customers using MCI for both Managed LAN and WAN services have a single consistent SLA across both network services, says John Schultz, senior director of managed network services at the carrier.
|
“It’s a competitive differentiator that MCI is offering [time-to-repair] guarantees for both its Managed LAN and WAN services,” Posey says.
For customers with LANs in 21 countries outside the U.S., MCI guarantees it will repair outages within four hours. The countries covered by this SLA include Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the U. K.
Customers with Managed LAN services in other parts of the world receive a six-hour time-to-repair guarantee.
MCI also has added performance guarantees for LAN device availability for workgroup and core LAN devices. For the first time, MCI says it guarantees at least 99.5% availability for all workgroup LAN switches and 99.95% for all core LAN devices.
The service provider offers a guarantee for customers with third-party maintenance contracts. For example, if a customer has a maintenance contract with Cisco, MCI is essentially backing up that agreement with a six-hour time-to-repair guarantee.
It’s the first time that MCI has offered a device-availability and third-party time-to-repair guarantees for its Managed LAN service customers.
The improved SLAs are available to all new Managed LAN service customers. The SLAs do not automatically apply to current customers, although they can add the SLAs to their contract during its next renewal period.
