Guarantees get real

Guaranteeing service quality is all the rage, and AT&T last week introduced an end-to-end guarantee in its new WorldNet Virtual Private Network Service.

The service is designed to provide 99.7% network availability over AT&T's Internet protocol (IP) backbone and offers security for both dial-up and dedicated users. A dial-up user would dial into one of AT&T's 300 local points of presence (POPs) throughout the country, where the data would be transported across the IP backbone. From there, it would travel to a hub-an internal World Wide Web site or mainframe host, for example-and to the corporate site, where a Cisco router would send the IP packets to the local area network.