FORE and SPRINT
Sprint says 'No way' to service
outages
New SLAs include availability guarantees as
high as 100%.
By David Rohde
Network World Fusion, 10/28/98
Sprint today introduced a broad range of service-level
agreements (SLA) that basically forbid any outages
for customers lucky enough to obtain an end-to-end
synchronous optical network (SONET) connection.
The carrier announced that any user sitting on what it
dubs a Broadband Metropolitan Area Network
(BMAN) will enjoy a full 100% network-availability
guarantee on all four of its key data services: frame
relay, ATM, Internet and intranet services.
The guarantees will be backed up by financial
penalties against Sprint for outages. Any outage
caused anywhere between user sites, that lasts for one
hour or less, will earn the user three days of free
service. Outages that last longer than one hour will
result in six days of free service.
According to Sprint officials, customers who do not
sit on a BMAN ring will now be upgraded to a
99.9% availability guarantee, including the IP services.
The kicker for the 100% availability guarantees will
be whether or not locations qualify as BMAN sites.
BMAN represents Sprint's effort to locate SONET
rings owned by regional Bell operating companies or
competitive local exchange carriers (CLEC) that
essentially match the horsepower of Sprint's
long-distance SONET network. Unlike rivals AT&T
and MCI WorldCom, Sprint generally has not built or
bought its own CLEC networks in large cities to
provide end-to-end broadband connections.
Sprint says there are qualifying BMAN rings in 30
cities, with 16 more due to come online this year and
44 next year. However, whether any user site in those
cities is considered to be a BMAN location is treated
on a case-by-case basis.
In another SLA upgrade, Sprint Internet access
customers will gain their first ever latency guarantees.
Sprint is now guaranteeing that transit across its
Internet backbone will take no longer than 75
milliseconds on average. Customers on Sprint's
dedicated intranet network will enjoy a 60 millisecond
guarantee. Neither of the delay guarantees includes
the local loop.
Sprint today also announced Managed Network
Services for ATM, a follow-on to its successful frame
relay managed router program.
The ATM managed program will incorporate the
user's choice of routers with ATM interface cards or
ATM switches at each site, said Mickey O'Dell, a
Sprint group manager for managed services.
Supported equipment will include specified switches
and routers from Nortel, FORE Systems, Kentrox
and Cisco. Prices start at $300 to $400 per month
per site in addition to ATM transport charges. |
