* MCI says it has reduced network failure response time by 10 minutes/incident
In a move designed to decrease the network downtime experienced by its corporate customers, MCI says it has reduced the time it takes to respond to network failures by an average of 10 minutes per incident.
This new capability is available at no extra cost to customers of MCI’s managed network services, which include 2,100 corporations worldwide.
With its so-called Rapid Fault Isolation, MCI has automated the process it uses to identify where network failures occur: whether on the customer’s premises, on the local exchange carrier’s network or on MCI’s WAN.
“We’re providing proactive and immediate identification of any anomalies within [customers’] networks,” says John Shultz, senior director of managed network services at MCI. “We can isolate and pinpoint a fault the moment it occurs. And we can provide automated real-time updates by voice, pager or e-mail on the status of the network.”
MCI’s announcement of this capability “is something special,” says Sean Hackett, senior analyst in Yankee Group’s telecommunications strategies group. “MCI is being pretty aggressive at alleviating enterprise customers’ fears about managed services.”
MCI has developed custom software that automatically runs tests to isolate network faults, and these tests now run in parallel rather than one at a time. With this new code, MCI says it can speed up its response to network faults by anywhere from eight to 11 minutes.
MCI also has developed an automated process for sending information via e-mail, pager or phone to its customers telling the status of network failures and the steps MCI is taking to fix them.
“This capability is unique; we don’t think anybody else can do it,” Shultz says. “The ability to restore networks is even more important for mission-critical applications such as IP telephony, e-business and e-commerce.”
MCI’s Rapid Fault Isolation works with any MCI service including IP, frame-relay, ATM and MPLS.
MCI’s competitors question whether MCI’s Rapid Fault Isolation capability is that novel. For example, Infonet says it has been proactively managing every element of its global managed network services – backbone, access and CPE – since June 2002. Indeed, Infonet says its global meantime to repair for all tickets for December 2004 was 1.78 hours.
“We have been electronically notifying clients of faults-e-mail, SMS, pager and fax are also options – and automatically opening tickets against those faults since [2002],” says Bob DaGiau, vice president of enterprise management services for Infonet. “Updating ticket status electronically and automatically has also been occurring since then.”
While ISPs may disagree about the specifics, there’s no doubt that reducing network downtime results in bottom-line savings for corporate network managers, industry analysts say.
A study by Alinean, an expert in return on investment analysis, found that one minute of downtime for a network infrastructure cost a company $700 on average. MCI says it is saving its customers at least $7,000 for each network failure by reducing its restoration process by 10 minutes.
“Every site experiences an anomaly at least once a year,” Shultz says. “With this system, we can isolate those problems and fix them much more quickly.”
Corporate network managers care most about network reliability and carrier responsiveness, according to The Yankee Group, which last November conducted a survey of 440 enterprises businesses about their satisfaction with their telecommunications carriers.
“Reliability and responsiveness came up as the two most important service characteristics,” Hackett says. “Coincidentally, the carriers seemed to have the lowest rate of satisfaction in those two areas…The carriers appear to be failing to deliver on the basics.”
MCI says it is reviewing its Mean Time to Repair guarantees in light of the Rapid Fault Isolation capabilities. Currently, MCI guarantees its managed network services customers that it will repair outages within three-and-a-half hours on average. However, MCI says it is actually performing at three hours on average.
“In the next 60 days, we’ll be looking at our SLAs on a global basis to take advantage of this capability,” Shultz says. “We’re already leading the industry in terms of mean time to repair. We’re looking at whether we can refine.”
