* AT&T guarantees five nines of availability
AT&T sparked a debate about service-level agreements in September, when it announced that it would guarantee the elusive five nines of availability – or 99.999% – for all of its IP services on an end-to-end basis.
AT&T’s enhancements to its SLAs for Internet-based services came just weeks after MCI committed to more aggressive IP performance metrics such as improved round-trip times between popular business centers around the globe.
SLAs are top criteria when network executives choose an ISP. That’s why we’ve decided to take a closer look at the SLAs offered by AT&T, MCI and other top-tier ISPs.
In today’s issue, we’ll analyze AT&T’s latest offerings. Later this week, we’ll look at the SLA enhancements MCI announced at the end of July. In future issues, we’ll look at the SLAs from Equant, Infonet and Sprint.
AT&T’s new performance metrics go into effect in mid-October. AT&T’s IP Services SLA now includes:
* 99.999% service availability on average during the course of a month. This guarantee covers the backbone network, Internet access lines and customer premise equipment. Previously, AT&T guaranteed 99.99% service availability.
* Latency improvements, including a guarantee of 39 milliseconds of latency within the U.S., 90 milliseconds within Asia-Pacific and 245 milliseconds between Asia-Pacific, Europe and the Middle East.
* A Time to Repair metric that guarantees an outage will be fixed in less than three hours in the U.S. This statistic – which is neither a mean-time or average-time to repair – is a new metric for AT&T’s SLAs.
* A full day’s credit will be given for outages that last one minute or longer.
AT&T’s new SLAs apply to all of its IP services including Internet access and IP VPN. The guarantees involve no additional costs to customers, AT&T says.
Joe Faranetta, director of IP services at AT&T, said the SLA changes are designed to reflect the network performance that AT&T has already been offering its corporate customers.
AT&T reports every 15 minutes on the delays and packet loss that its IP network experiences. This information is available on a public Web site.
“Our latency performance has been running at 35 milliseconds for the last four years, but our SLA was at 60 milliseconds,” Faranetta says. “Our customers were saying: Why don’t you make them match?”
AT&T’s enhancements to its IP Services SLAs are part of a broader effort within AT&T to unify and simplify its SLAs. AT&T is re-writing its SLAs to use the same definitions for network performance whether the company is talking about IP, frame relay, ATM or any other data service.
“We’re trying to consolidate our SLAs across as many services as possible,” Faranetta says. “We want to get eventually to a single SLA.”
Faranetta says this effort will take another two years.
“The next step after consistency of definitions is the consistency of measurement,” he says. “I might measure latency one way for IP services and another way for frame-relay. We will more easily be able to integrate offerings for our customers if we can provide a single SLA.”
AT&T’s standard SLA for IP services is also shrinking in size. “Our goal is to go from four pages down to two pages,” Faranetta says. “Our intent is to shrink the amount of pages it covers by shrinking the amount of fine print.”
AT&T says 95% of its corporate customers fall under its standard SLAs.
During the last year, AT&T has made two other enhancements to its SLAs. A year ago, the company added a metric dubbed R-Factor that measures the performance of VoIP applications. AT&T also added guarantees regarding denial-of-service attacks.
