Broadwing raises the bar on SLAs

Broadwing Communications is expected this week to announce a service-level agreement that guarantees performance of IP traffic even when Broadwing has to pass off the packets to AT&T, WorldCom or Sprint for final delivery.

While other ISP networks may be added, "more than 60% of our off-net traffic travels over these networks," says Justine Lupul, director of Internet services at Broadwing.

The SLA, which applies only to customers that have dedicated Internet access, guarantees 100% peer network availability, 90 msec or less of round-trip latency, and no more than 1% packet loss over their peers' networks.

One Broadwing customer is happy to see the new SLAs. "Internet usage is critical to us now that we have applications that are Web-based," says Joe Bellano, telecommunications manager at Sungard Asset Management Systems. "A lot of our Internet activity is after-hours, such as downloading several large files from market data vendors. If our network is down it hurts us.

"While much of Sungard's traffic travels over Broadwing's network, Bellano says he often sees traceroute information from Sprint and WorldCom.

"One of the primary applications for this guarantee will probably be IP VPNs," says Jason Knowles, an analyst at Current Analysis. When companies need to support hundreds or thousands of VPN end users they typically have to deal with more than one carrier.

The new off-net SLA will be offered in conjunction with Broadwing's existing on-net SLA, which guarantees 100% network availability, 50 msec or less of round-trip latency, and no more than 1% packet loss.

While Broadwing is leading the industry with this new guarantee, Qwest Communications was actually the first to offer an off-net SLA. In October, Qwest introduced an SLA that guarantees dedicated Internet access customers 95 msec or less of round-trip delay for traffic transversing the top five ISP networks (see www.nwfusion.com, DocFinder: 8156). Qwest will not name those service providers.

Although Broadwing's guarantee spans AT&T's, WorldCom's and Sprint's networks, customers may wait for similar pledges from those providers. AT&T says it is looking constantly at new features but is not prepared to make this commitment. WorldCom says it has less of a need to offer such SLAs because the majority of customers' traffic stays on the WorldCom network end-to-end. Sprint does not currently offer any off-net guarantees. Sprint would not comment.

But Knowles says many larger ISPs have tests under way that could result in similar guarantees, some of which may be announced by year-end.

To back up its SLA, Broadwing will post metrics on its Web site from third-party performance monitoring company Keynote Systems. The site will include daily, weekly and monthly reports that show latency, packet loss and network availability for Broadwing's backbone and the networks of its peering partners, Lupul says.

"This is the step in the right direction," says Michael Suby, an analyst at Stratacast Partners. "But what would be more helpful are SLAs that offer application specific guarantees such as jitter." Too much jitter can affect the quality of voice- or video-traffic-over-IP connections.

ISPs also should offer SLAs that cover company-specific user networks besides networkwide SLAs, which are most common, Suby says. Frame relay users, for example, are offered committed information rates that guarantee specific bandwidth availability, but no such promises are available for IP services.

The off-net SLA is available to all Broadwing customers at no additional charge, but users are required to contact their sales representatives to have the SLA added to their contracts. Users also are required to request credits if Broadwing does not live up to its guarantees.