MCI ups the SLA ante

MCI Inc. has raised the bar on its Internet services, announcing new service-level agreements (SLAs) for Internet service performance that offer increased service thresholds and guarantees for IP traffic internationally.

The new SLAs are aimed at businesses that deploy Internet applications and services to their business centers both nationally and internationally. 

"Businesses today are deploying sophisticated applications to remote locations, but often have no guarantee that these remote locations have good availability to use these applications. These new services aim to remove that barrier," said Ralph Monfort, MCI's director of Internet Access Services.

MCI has tightened its SLAs for IP traffic between key global business centers and added more stringent network performance guarantees for latency and additional packet guarantees. MCI improved its guarantee of latency around the world, dropping the speed from 55 milliseconds to 45 milliseconds in North America and from 55 milliseconds to 30 milliseconds in Europe, according to the company. MCI defines latency as the speed in which traffic travels the company's global backbone. MCI also introduced a jitter guarantee of 1 millisecond for U.S. traffic. That guarantee is aimed at voice-over IP (VoIP) applications.

The company also increased its availability guarantees. That guarantee is 100 percent if the service is ordered and deployed from MCI. That guarantee goes all the way to the local loop, the last few feet of cable to an office location, said Monfort. "We have confidence in our ability to guarantee this or we wouldn't be doing it," he said.

That is a significant money-back guarantee, said Steven Harris, an analyst at IDC in Framingham, Mass. "That can be very important to a company. MCI backs that up with a customer credit that is offered proactively. A proactive credit is unusual. It's the only one I know of. Most companies make the customer monitor service and request credit," he said.

Harris said MCI is to be applauded for attempting to simplify SLA contracts. "Most SLAs are full of legalese that is subject to a lot of interpretation. Companies are starting to look at their SLAs more closely and MCI is right on target trying to make them easier to understand and to be proactive with the customer," he said.

MCI is applying the new SLAs to its existing customers, said Monfort.

The new SLAs are part of MCI's more aggressive strategy since emerging from bankruptcy earlier this year. The company plans to introduce next-generation Ethernet capabilities later this year that will extend corporate local area networks into IP-ready wide-area networks.