AT&T will guarantee "five nines" IP service availability for the first time from its core network to customer premises equipment with a new service level agreement (SLA) for its 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;"
- taising 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;
- Real financial remedies, such as a full day's credit for as little as a four-minute outage.
AT&T said its new global performance metrics are designed to address customers' primary objective of superior performance, rather than financial credits for sub-par performance. Customers can track packet loss and latency via a web portal. http://www.att.com/business
