Carriers beef up service-level agreements

SANTA CLARA - Covad Communications has begun offering broader service-level agreements, a move that could help the DSL carrier differentiate its services from those of incumbents if it can deliver on its lofty promises.

Covad's new SLAs, which went into effect in late April, provide DSL service guarantees from the customer premises to the point where traffic hits the Internet. The carrier's new guarantees address installation times and availability of the incumbent local exchange carrier (ILEC) loops on which Covad's services rely.

Covad previously offered SLAs based only on the availability of its ATM backbone.

"We felt that including the local line in the SLA was important," says Kimberly Odom, director of product support for Covad's wholesale products. "We've managed our relationship with the ILECs for a while now, and that's why we're confident we can do this."

Still, observers say Covad will be challenged to meet its objectives as it attempts to complete the comeback it began earlier this year when it emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

"It's hard to offer a firm SLA when you're provisioning off of someone else's network," says Matthew Davis, an analyst with The Yankee Group. "They still have to rely on the ILEC."

Other competitive DSL providers, such as New Edge Networks, offer SLAs similar to Covad's, observers say. But incumbents offer less-extensive SLAs, even though they have begun offering business-class DSL services.

Covad's next step should be to give customers a way to monitor DSL traffic in real time, so they can tell if SLAs are being met, says Pat Hurley, an analyst with TeleChoice. Under the new SLAs, customers need to call Covad to confirm whether an SLA has been broken.

Covad is providing guarantees on the local loop in three ways.