[30974] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Ameritech Service Quality Report
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Brett Frankenberger)
Sun Sep 3 09:48:34 2000
Message-Id: <200009031257.HAA29066@rbfux.rbfnet.com>
To: nanog@merit.edu
Date: Sun, 3 Sep 2000 07:57:28 -0500 (CDT)
From: "Brett Frankenberger" <rbf@rbfnet.com>
In-Reply-To: <20000903083018.18939.cpmta@c004.sfo.cp.net> from "Sean Donelan" at Sep 03, 2000 01:30:18 AM
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>
> What I find interesting isn't Ameritech's long repair times, but how
> do providers promise 4 hour repair times when the dominant local loop
> provider takes over a day to fix something on a good day.
Repair time promises are marketing tools, just like X% availablity
SLAs. They don't really think all repairs will happen in the stated
time, nor do they think all customers will have X% availability. What
they do thinl is that in most months, most customers won't go down.
And they'll pay the penalty to the rest, because those that do go down
might well be down longer than the stated repair time and it might well
drive availability below the guaranteed level.
They don't have to *ever* fix something in under 4 hours just because
they offer such a guarantee, because they will still live up to the
guarantee to most customers (i.e. customers that never go down).
Ask for an SLA that pays you, say, $100,000 if they miss the mark. You
won't get it, because know they're going to miss the mark. They can
afford to do so, as long as they don't miss it often, and they keep the
costs of missing it low enough.
-- Brett
