Sample Internet SLAs

Wed May 8 02:31:40 UTC 2002

Hey all!

I want to first thank all of you that responded to my request about
providers for IP VPN services with more of a focus on just ISP service as we
will be doing CPE based VPN.  Now I'm finalizing these proposals, I'd be
interested to know what you all would recommend seeing in your SLAs and what
you missed if you have one now, especially things you WISH you'd have put in
there.  Caveats on certain providers would be helpful to know too.  Things
I'm interested in are, but not limited to:

1.  Per circuit (not aggregate) SLA
2.  Latency - <60ms end-to-end
3.  MTTR (Mean Time To Repair) not respond
4.  Cause for disconnect with-out penalty
5.  Credit levels for outages
6.  Maximum outages per circuit
7.  When does and outage start, when customer reports it, when it goes down,
etc.
8.  Are ARC (Annual Revenue Commitments) good ideas or bad?
9.  Reasonable up-time
10. Managing the local-loop in the SLA
11. Definition of "end-to-end" (PoP to PoP, CPE to CPE, etc.)
12. How is latency measured (aggregate over 30 days, daily, etc.)
13. Proactively manage outages (most are local-loop issues anyway)
14. Provisioning guarantees (give me something if you can't get it in and
your waiving the install charges so that's no good).
15. "Outs" in the contract for SLA violations.
15a. Poor service, can we terminate contract for violations, and how many.
15b. Do same discounts apply if ARC is not met because of service
disconnects due to non-performance?

and anything else ANY of you can provide would be very much appreciated.

One other questions is, is it possible/effective to use the vendor's SLA and
have addendums to state our requests and needs?  Then, in the SLA be able to
state that what ever is better for the customer (should the provider
"upgrade" their SLA) will be what the provider is held to up-hold in their
SLA?  Hope that's understandable.

Thank you for your time!

- Darrell

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Darrell Kristof, Network Manager/Team Leader
Whole Foods Market, Corporate Offices
E-Mail: darrell.kristof at wholefoods.com