Virtela revamps SLAs with billing accuracy and timeliness

Virtela Communications, a Denver-based provider of global VPN services, is offering what it claims is the industry’s first service-level agreements around billing accuracy and timeliness. 

Virtela’s Global Billing SLA guarantees 100% billing accuracy in all 190 countries where Virtela provides service. If Virtela does commit a billing error, it guarantees resolution within one billing period.

The service provider also committed to tougher standards for DSL VPN services in such areas as availability, packet loss, latency and mean time to repair in more than 100 countries. A new installation SLA is available in 190 countries.

“With this announcement, we ensured that we met or are better than anybody in the industry with our SLAs,” says Jeff Phillips, vice president of marketing for Virtela. “All of our SLAs are end-to-end, so they cover not only our network but the last-mile local loop as well as the hardware involved.”

With its new billing SLA, Virtela is trying to solve an annoyance for corporate network managers, who often hire outside firms to check the accuracy of their monthly telecom bills.

“Some customers have gone six or 12 months before they get resolution from their carriers. We’re shooting for 30 days,” Phillips says. “I have penalties associated with not being 100% accurate and not being able to fix it.” 

Virtela says its billing SLA is a first for the industry. The VPN provider says its DSL SLAs are also industry leaders.

“We’re aggregating all these last-mile providers into our service fabric,” Phillips says. “There are some SLAs for DSL services from a few players…but our global reach is greater. We’ve never seen anyone offer this outside the U.S.”

In addition, Virtela’s installation SLA guarantees how quickly the service provider will be able to turn up circuits and ports in locations around the world. Virtela says that no other service provider offers an installation guarantee in so many countries.

Virtela’s new global mean time to repair SLA guarantees four hours or less, including backbone network, local loop and customer premises equipment problems.

“For all of these SLAs, it really comes down to Virtela’s architecture,” Phillips says. “Virtela owns intelligent routing policy centers around the world that are able to control traffic and identify the best routes…We can do unique things from a network performance point of view.”

Virtela’s new SLAs are available immediately.