Qwest adds jitter promise to SLAs

Qwest today said it has added a guarantee of low jitter to its service-level agreements that are part of the company’s recently launched iQ Networking service. The measurement, which long has been a concern for enterprises transmitting streaming media, takes on more significance as they start sending voice over their IP-based networks.

"It really helps address a need in the market," said Bob Schroeder, senior director of product management for VPN and managed security at Qwest.

As part of the new SLAs, which customers have been getting since the end of last year, Qwest is guaranteeing that jitter on any traffic over its network will be held to under two milliseconds. In recent tests, Schroeder said, the company’s network was proven to have imperceptible jitter. Jitter, like latency measures the delay in packets moving across a network, but is a more specific to real-time services such as voice.

In the new SLA, Qwest also is giving users a Web-based tool to monitor jitter performance in real time.