* Chime in with your thoughts on the ISP metrics that most matter to you
AT&T this month announced major enhancements to its service-level agreements for Internet-based services. The ink on AT&T’s press release was barely dry when MCI countered that it already meets or exceeds most of AT&T’s new performance guarantees.
AT&T this month announced major enhancements to its service-level agreements for Internet-based services. The ink on AT&T’s press release was barely dry when MCI countered that it already meets or exceeds most of AT&T’s new performance guarantees.
This SLA posturing between the two largest ISPs in the U.S. leaves corporate network executives in a quandary. How do they figure out which company offers better performance on Internet services?
Over the next few issues of the ISP News Report, we’ll look at the SLAs offered by AT&T, MCI and other top-tier ISPs.
We’re also asking readers of the ISP News Report to share their own experiences and insights in evaluating SLAs for Internet services such as dedicated and remote access, transport, collocation and VPNs. Hopefully, we’ll generate a lively and informative discussion about the SLAs offered today by the major ISPs.
First, let’s talk about why it’s so important for you to carefully evaluate the SLAs offered by service providers before you award or renew your contract.
SLAs are where the rubber hits the road in terms of the level of network performance an ISP will guarantee a corporate customer as well as the remedies and credits that the service provider will offer if it doesn’t meet those guarantees. That’s why corporate buyers and their lawyers must review these pages of documentation with a keen eye.
“Research shows time and time again that SLAs are a [priority] for the enterprise buyer, especially when you’re talking about Internet services,” says David Parks, senior analyst with The Yankee Group. “When either selecting a provider or renegotiating a contract with a provider, SLAs and price are the top items when it comes to Internet services.”
SLAs are critical for Internet services because the network is designed for best-effort service and because traffic is transported across a public infrastructure.
“Anytime you make improvements to SLAs, especially when you’re talking about Internet and not private IP backbones, it’s a good thing for customers,” Parks says.
Parks says it’s hard for corporate buyers to track SLAs because service providers regularly improve performance guarantees such as the latency between particular pairs of cities.
He advises network executives to start evaluating SLAs by looking at their own networks first. Buyers should focus on the cities where they do business and look at the latency between them. Buyers should consider their mission-critical applications to determine the availability they need and whether other performance metrics such as jitter are important.
“It’s going to come down to an individual, case-by-case basis,” Parks says. “It depends on how you engineer your network and what your traffic patterns are. One performance metric or SLA guarantee may resonate with some customers more than others.”
For example, AT&T just announced that it would offer 99.999% availability for Internet services globally from the backbone to the customer premise equipment. MCI says that it has been offering 100% availability for five years. How important is this difference?
“We’re talking about a fraction of a percentage point difference here. How important that is will depend on the customer,” Parks says. “If you’re a large financial services company doing grid computing to calculate trends in financial markets, where split-second timing is critical to millions of dollars of transactions, you may weight the opportunity cost of not having 100% availability. But for the average enterprise customer, five nines of availability is pretty darn good.”
How do you evaluate SLAs for Internet services? What metrics – availability, latency, jitter, etc. – matter most to you and why? Send me e-mail (mailto:cmarsan@nww.com) with your thoughts, and we’ll share them with the rest of our readers.
Next week, we’ll look at the latest SLA enhancements from AT&T and MCI.
