* How Sprint leads competitors on SLAs
When it comes to innovative service-level agreements, Sprint is often one step ahead of the competition. The Kansas ISP doesn’t always lead the pack on specific performance metrics, but it is a trendsetter when it comes to philosophical changes in customer service.
Case in point: In August, Sprint was the first carrier to announce SLAs for business customers of its wireless services. The new wireless SLAs include service credits to businesses with company-paid wireless plans based on the performance of Sprint’s Nationwide PCS Network.
Sprint is similarly a thought-leader when it comes to SLAs for its IP services. A year ago, Sprint announced simplified SLAs across its global data portfolio. The new SLAs use common metrics and language to make it easier for corporate network managers to oversee multiple contracts for data services, including private-line, frame-relay, ATM and IP.
Now AT&T is following in Sprint’s footsteps. In September, AT&T announced several enhancements to its SLAs, including more aggressive performance guarantees for network availability and latency. AT&T said its enhancements to its IP services SLAs are part of a broader effort to unify and simplify its SLAs. AT&T said it is rewriting its SLAs to use the same definitions for network performance across its data services.
AT&T says this effort will take another two years. If so, Sprint will end up being three years ahead of AT&T in this regard.
“We already have unified SLAs across our data services,” says Michael Buttrey, director of product management for Sprint. “We standardized the SLAs as much as we could to make them easy for our customers to understand. We use the same terminology. The actual SLA document uses the same format and flow. We use the same tables. We very much tried to unify them.”
Sprint is also a leader when it comes to offering its customers refunds for failing to meet its SLA guarantees. A year ago, Sprint was the first ISP to offer a full refund of its monthly recurring charge if it failed to deliver agreed-upon performance metrics. These credits apply to Sprint’s premier SprintLink IP services.
“We back up our SLAs with a 100% remedy – a full month’s credit,” Buttrey says. “For example, if the jitter number in the U.S. goes above 2 milliseconds for a month, we pay out a whole month’s recurring charge.”
In fairness, some of Sprint’s performance guarantees are lower than both AT&T’s and MCI’s. Sprint’s availability guarantee is 99.9%, while AT&T offers 99.999% and MCI touts 100%.
Sprint only offers 100% availability for customers that use its local exchange carrier services and purchase dual local loops for redundancy.
“We can offer 100% if a customer is on our broadband metropolitan-area network service,” Buttrey says. “If we have fiber into the premise and if we act as the local exchange carrier, we can offer a higher level of availability. We’ll do two local loops to provide a diverse service and a more expensive service for customers that have requirements for 100% availability.”
Similarly, Sprint’s guarantee of 55 milliseconds of latency domestically is less aggressive than AT&T’s guarantee of 39 milliseconds. While AT&T has a new mean-time-to-repair guarantee in its SLAs, Sprint doesn’t have an SLA guarantee in that area.
In the area of packet loss, Sprint meets AT&T’s guarantee of 99.9% here in the U.S. and offers that same aggressive metric in Europe and Asia.
Where Sprint tries to differentiate itself from AT&T and others is in backing up the claims it makes in its SLAs.
“Our credit structure is more aggressive than some of our competitors,” says Kirk Meyers, product manager with Sprint. “There are no hidden calculations or metrics. What you see on our Web site is exactly what you pay for.”
What has your experience been with the SLAs offered by Sprint or another ISP? Let me know at mailto:cmarsan@nww.com
