COMMENT - Guarantees of ISP services are dead on arrival

One of the biggest criticisms of the internet as a serious business tool is its lack of guaranteed quality of service. The inability to connect to your ISP's server, snail's-pace downloads or sluggish e-mail may be irritating for the home user, but could also have disastrous consequences for any commercially critical application.

The view is that sooner or later ISPs will introduce commercial grades of service for business users - at a commercial price too, no doubt. Good news, then, that UUNet Worldcom has taken a leaf out of the telecoms service providers' book by introducing service-level agreements (SLAs) defining the grade of service that business users - determined by leased-line access - can expect.

They specify, for example, 100 per cent network availability, an average monthly latency of no more than 85 milliseconds within Europe, and guaranteed customer notification of outage within 15 minutes of a problem occurring, as well as guaranteed line installation dates. If these are not met, customers are promised a rebate on their service or installation charges.

Telecoms users have been used to this kind of thing for some time now (though no-one's ever promised them 100 per cent availability). Nobody would expect to enter into an agreement with a service provider, typically in an outsourcing situation, without negotiating SLAs and including them in a legally binding contract. So ISPs are catching up with telecoms.

Unfortunately for them, however, telecoms users are already beginning to think that SLAs are not enough anymore.

The Network Outsourcing Association, for example, told Network News earlier this year that, in president Martyn Hart's words, "SLAs are dead." Why?

Because they provide technical measures of network performance that are neither meaningful nor useful in terms of how the end user actually experiences an application running. Users are finding that, even though SLAs are being met, service quality can still be rubbish.

Specialist legal firm, Eversheds, recognised the problem. Writing for the Telecommunications Users Association Yearbook recently, solicitors Frances Swanson and Melanie Evans warned: "All too often, these performance criteria are translated into complex formulae that are not user-friendly and baffle those concerned in the day-to-day operation of the service."

The latest arrival on the bandwagon is Ian Kilpatrick, managing director of software specialist Wick Hill, which sells software for measuring application performance.

"Unless you measure at least some of the performance levels from the desktop, you can't have a dialogue between service providers and service receivers," he said. Of the sort of SLAs that UUNet is introducing, he said: "That's a big and important measure, but corporates say we want to know what we're experiencing, not what people say they are delivering to us."

Kilpatrick also claims that some of the better ISPs understand this need, and are genuinely interested in the sort of methodology that would measure and guarantee performance at the desktop, rather than at the 'wall socket' via which services are delivered.

Since it's clear that telecoms users are so disgruntled with SLAs and are clamouring for change, no doubt they too would welcome the kind of service guarantee that is based on what happens in the workplace, rather than what the network is doing behind the scenes. But while the technology might be available to provide end-to-end tracking of IP-based network services, such a thing may be much more difficult for conventional telecoms services, particularly in the voice arena.

Here, there is a confusing mix of proprietary standards and levels of network complexity that would work against the development and deployment of systems capable of measuring exactly what's going on at the customer's site. Tying it all together would be a technical nightmare, let alone the horrors of building it into a legally binding contract agreement.

Service quality may leave much to be desired, but the potential is there to not only equal that of conventional public networks, but also to exceed it in a quantifiable way by providing superior delivery to end users.

The SLA may be dead and its successor as yet unidentified. But it looks like the latter will emerge from the IP sector and become another nail in the coffin of old-fashioned telecoms.

Stephen Hannington has worked in the telecoms industry since 1990, including five years as a journalist.