Guarantees get real: AT&T introduces end-to-end quality in VPN offering

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.

If a customer reports his service is down for 10 minutes for more in a single day, AT&T will credit that company 5% of his monthly connection charge up to a maximum of 25% in one month.

AT&T supports 56 kb/s modems in certain cities and plans to support ISDN dial-up access by April 1998.

The Cardomon Group Inc., a legal service bureau for law firms, is one of AT&T's first customers. The bureau uses the service to share transcripts with clients, colleagues and competitors without paying for hardware, software and staffing.

Closed user groups and TCP/IP tunneling let the customer define which dial-up users can access data at their corporate sites. Each dial-up user is assigned a profile that governs which sites he or she can access.

The destination can be restricted by packet-filtering technology or by using a network-based tunnel with authentication at the customer premises.

All POPs, routers, modem pools and authentication servers reside in secure AT&T locations.

The network-based protection also safeguards users from "spoofing," the act of hacking into a site by posing as another VPN user. Packet filters at the edges of the IP backbone implement Source Address Assurance to prevent spoofing from other access points.

"The Internet has no guarantees and no security. We'll guarantee business performance, business-class quality," said Denise Grey, marketing director for AT&T's VPN Solutions.

The service also offers three pricing components: remote access charges for dial-up use, a connection charge and optional services. The monthly recurring charge depends on the speed of the connection for the dedicated link to AT&T's IP backbone, ranging from $103 for a 16 kb/s connection to $2366 for a 1 Mb/s managed connection.

Local dial access is $3 an hour, or flat-rate plans are available at $34.95 for 20 hours, $69.95 for 40 hours and $99.95 for 60 hours; each additional hour costs $3.

Other companies leading in these services are Concentric Network Corp. and UUNet.

Concentric, for example, is partnering with VPNet Technologies to deliver an IP-based VPN service. Concentric guarantees end-to-end latency and 99.5% network uptime. From any two points within the Concentric network, the guaranteed measured latency is 150 milliseconds or less.

VPNet supplies hardware that compresses the data in real time, eliminating packet fragmentation common to VPN solutions.

Concentric's pricing model is based on levels of average use, which is determined by traffic samples taken every five minutes and averaged over a month. The prices range from $1095 monthly for up to 64 kb/s to $2695 for 384 kb/s and higher.

The service includes Java-based management tools that simplify setup and management of VPNs.

UUNet was not available for comment.

Both the service guarantees and pricing differentials are waves of the future, one analyst said.

"Quality of service is defined by the availability of the network, the bandwidth of the connection and the latency characteristics of the connection, plus security," said Traver Kennedy, managing director at The Aberdeen Group, Boston. "Over time, all services will be priced according to those characteristics."

David Goodtree, director of telecom strategies at Forrester Research, expects VPNs to ramp up quickly to cannibalize part of today's frame relay marketplace and to create "a whole new explosion" in wide area network services.

Among the important items to be measured in guaranteed quality are dial-up port availability, installation timeliness and trouble ticket responsiveness, he said.