AT&T Boosts SLAsAT&T Boosts SLAs

AT&T announces unsurpassed performance metrics across its global IP services portfolio

September 16, 2004

2 Min Read

BEDMINSTER, N.J. -- AT&T today announced industry-leading performance metrics across its global Internet protocol (IP) services portfolio, extending the highest level of availability end to end for the first time from its core network to customer premises equipment. With this announcement, AT&T becomes the first provider to offer a service level agreement (SLA) that addresses end-to-end service availability at 99.999 percent.

As customers continue to put their most critical business applications on IP networks, they increasingly require improved levels of performance to ensure high availability of those applications. The new AT&T global performance metrics are designed to address customers' primary objective of superior performance, rather than financial credits for sub-par performance.

"Today's announcement is a testament to our unwavering confidence in the reliability and performance of our industry-leading global IP network, that we're able to back up our services with these types of SLAs," said Kathleen Flaherty, AT&T chief marketing officer. "The significant investments we've made in the past few years into continuously improving our network, operational support systems and performance reporting tools enable us to make these commitments and guarantees to our customers."

Highlights of AT&T's new performance standards, which are effective mid- October, include:

  • The industry's first end-to-end service availability metric of 99.999%;

  • A Time to Repair metric that establishes an absolute time commitment to repair a specific outage rather than the industry standard of "Mean Time to Repair;"

  • Raising the bar in packet delivery and latency-considered the best measure of network performance-by slashing its current latency metrics, for example, by more than 50 percent in some geographies like Asia-Pacific; and

  • Real financial remedies, such as a full day's credit for as little as a four-minute outage.



"AT&T is really raising the bar with these SLAs. This is a comprehensive and aggressive move to challenge the industry's traditional methods of measuring performance in a way that is meaningful to customers and meeting their business objectives," said Kate Gerwig, Principal Analyst for Business Network Services at Current Analysis. "It will be harder for competitors to be vague about their SLA commitments when AT&T's are out there in bold print."

AT&T Corp.

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