* Are IP SLAs finally maturing?
Next month, Cincinnati carrier PowerNet Global Communications will launch IP VPN services throughout about half the country that carry its Silver, Gold and Platinum service classes.
Each class will have service-level agreements (SLA) for key performance metrics, including end-to-end guaranteed bandwidth (i.e., an “IP committed information rate”), latency, jitter and packet loss. The carrier has issued a press release saying it will guarantee worst-case latency (under 65 msec) and jitter (under 0.5 msec) for premium traffic, thereby enabling “ATM-grade IP VPNs” and toll-quality VoIP.
Unlike most IP services today, the guarantees won’t pertain to a monthly overall network average, which can render them virtually meaningless to a given site or user’s actual day-to-day experience.
Rather, the SLAs will be in effect at “any time you measure the network,” explains Bernie Stevens, PowerNet Global’s CEO.
The services will initially be available to about 50% of the U.S. population, he says, with plans to expand. Services will be accessible in approximately a 100-square-mile radius of the following cities and areas: Atlanta, Chicago, Cincinnati, Dallas, Denver, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle and Washington, D.C.
At the core of PowerNet Global’s forthcoming services are the much-talked-about Axiowave Networks XCR128 backbone routers. The XCR128 was launched earlier this month and reportedly can support very high levels of both high-priority and best-effort traffic on the same router egress port.
Axiowave contends that its gear allows carriers to actually begin realizing the benefits of IP convergence because they don’t have to severely overbuild their IP networks to protect high-priority traffic from being trampled upon by best-effort traffic.
PowerNet Global sees things similarly. Stevens admits that before discovering the Axiowave platform, the carrier wasn’t planning to offer IP VPN services at all, because the “business case was nearly impossible to justify, due to equipment costs and the commodity pricing of best-effort IP.”
While some of the details of PowerNet Global’s new services, such as pricing, are not yet available, the company anticipates selling to large enterprises in major cities with videoconferencing applications and to midsized enterprises within the 100-mile radius of the cities noted in the near term. It also anticipates carrying lots of VoIP traffic for overseas PTTs that want higher SLAs.
