MCI announces managed network SLAs

Against the backdrop of acquisition chaos, MCI continues to work at pleasing its corporate customers, today announcing service level agreements for its managed network services that not only encompass third-party networks but reduce repair times.

The new SLAs are a follow-up to last January's announcement of new Rapid Fault Isolation. Working with Visual Networks to create end-to-end visibility of a network down to the user device and application, MCI is using the new capability to "give us a leadership position in terms of our ability to restore networks," said John Shultz, senior director, Managed Network Services for MCI.

Network downtime is expensive for corporate customers, he said, costing an average of $40 an hour per knowledge worker, or as much as $4.5 million an hour for large enterprises, according to Yankee Group Enterprise Infrastructure Research figures.

MCI is now promising network repair time of 3.5 hours for its U.S. networks and four hours for networks of third parties and international centers. For remote locations, the promised repair time is six hours. In addition, the service provider will allow corporate customers to "mix and match" levels of availability on their network, paying to get higher availability based on backup resources at corporate headquarters or other mission-critical sites and allowing for less investment in backups at less critical sites.

"The reality is the people have different applications for different sites, some of which may require full circuits for redundancy and some of which won't," he said.

MCI's standard SLAs for third-party network are based on the company's extensive experience managing third-party networks, including interconnection and long-distance facilities leased from other carriers as well as local connections.

"We have managed 22,000 end-to-end broadband carrier circuits from 60 network service providers globally," Shultz said. "We have taken that experience and standardized it. Now we are stepping up to SLA levels equivalent to those we have for managing our own network."

Where customers deploy dual circuits and complete redundancy, MCI will manage to 100% network availability. With a dial-up, ISDN or DSL line backup, it will manage to 99.9% availability, and for sites with no backup, it is promising 99.5% availability.

MCI's automated fault isolation capabilities enable the company to more quickly identify where the network problem is, Shultz said. Sixty percent of those problems are in local exchange carrier networks and MCI can't guarantee 3.5 hours repair time if the problem is as serious as a fiber cut.

"Under those circumstances, we will bear the financial risk with our customers by giving them a credit against our monthly management fees," he said.

Working with Visual Networks, MCI is also giving its customers a high level of visibility on applications and troubleshooting of apps at no extra charge, Shultz said.