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AT&T last week began touting new IP service-level agreements that constitute some of the strongest performance guarantees available.
The carrier's revised SLAs guarantee that its IP services, including standard dedicated Internet access and IP VPN services, will be available at least 99.999% of the time. It also is promises that packet delivery will be at least 99.9% and latency will not exceed 39 millisec on average, per month.
Competitors will be forced to take notice, says Kate Gerwig, principal analyst for business network services at Current Analysis. "Especially for commodity services like dedicated IP What else is there to differentiate on other than network performance and SLAs?" Gerwig asks.
Business customers continue to look to SLAs as a means of comparing providers.
"SLAs are extremely important when purchasing IP services,"says Jason Hittleman, IT director at RKA Petroleum in Romulus, Mich. "For RKA Petroleum Companies, service availability is the most important SLA, since redundant circuits are not always an option."
RKA is not alone according to analysts. "SLAs consistently rank high in provider selection criteria," says David Parks, a senior analyst at The Yankee Group.
AT&T's previous SLA offered a minimum packet-delivery guarantee of 99.3%...