* MCI claims to have been offering 100% IP services availability since 1999
AT&T made headlines in September, when it announced that it was the first ISP to guarantee end-to-end service availability of 99.999% in its service-level agreements.
AT&T made headlines in September, when it announced that it was the first ISP to guarantee end-to-end service availability of 99.999% in its service-level agreements.
MCI, however, says its SLAs for IP services have surpassed that statistic for years. Indeed, MCI says it has been offering 100% availability on IP services ordered and provisioned by MCI since 1999.
“The 100% availability [guarantee] is end to end, and it includes the local loop. It includes the customer premise, and it includes the backbone,” says Russell Limbert, senior manager for service quality and reporting at MCI.
“Anytime a customer has an outage for a fraction of an hour, [the 100% availability guarantee] kicks in,” Limbert says. “If a customer was out on Sept. 13 from 2:00 p.m. to 2:10 p.m., all they have to do is submit a credit request by e-mail.”
Limbert says MCI’s 100% availability guarantee applies to corporate customers with dedicated and remote Internet access as well as those using IP VPNs and Internet collocation services. The 100% availability applies to all of the U.S. and parts of Asia, Europe and the Middle East.
Customers receive one day of credit for each hour of outage, MCI says.
“The majority of our corporate customers fall under this,” Limbert adds.
As this disagreement over availability metrics shows, the question of which ISP offers the best SLAs is open to debate.
At least once a year, the top-tier ISPs tighten up their SLAs and commit to more aggressive performance metrics or new measurements for emerging applications. So it’s hard to tell which carrier is ahead on SLAs at any given point in time.
Since SLAs are top criteria when network executives choose an ISP, we are taking a closer look at the SLAs offered by MCI, AT&T and others.
In today’s issue, we’ll look at the SLA enhancements MCI announced in the end of July. Last issue, we looked at AT&T’s SLA and in future issues, we’ll look at the SLAs from Equant, Infonet and Sprint.
MCI’s latest announcement involved beefing its SLAs with more aggressive latency and packet loss guarantees. That announcement included:
* New latency measurements for 31 locations, such as between North America and India, Korea and Taiwan.
* Enhanced latency metrics for 11 locations such as North America, which is now 45 milliseconds instead of 55 milliseconds.
* New packet delivery guarantees of 99% for 31 locations including Latin America, Asia Pacific, Europe and the Middle East.
* Improved latency and packet delivery statistics for traffic traveling between key business cities such as Hong Kong to Tokyo or Taiwan to Sydney.
* A new guarantee for jitter of 1 millisecond or less in the U.S. (This is a key metric for voice and video applications.)
Limbert says MCI is the only top-tier ISP to guarantee performance metrics between particular cities overseas. “I’m not aware of any other provider offering SLAs naming [metrics] from one city to another,” he adds.
In addition to improving its SLAs, MCI is trying to provide more information to its customers about how their networks are performing rather than just information about how MCI’s overall network is performing.
“There’s a lot of reporting we can do to get down to the customer premise equipment,” Limber says. “We do that today with our managed services.”
MCI’s SLA enhancements were effective on July 28 and come at no additional cost.
