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To: djane who wrote (50294)	7/23/1998 2:31:00 AM
From: djane	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 61433

Guaranteeing 'Net access. To win contracts, ISPs back network reliability boston.com By John Dodge, 07/22/98 Service level agreements, which guarantee network reliability and performance, illustrate how much the Internet has grown up. Not to be confused with the Symbionese Liberation Army of Patty Hearst fame, SLAs impose stiff penalties when a company's Internet access gets kidnapped. They represent the battleground where Internet service providers slug it out to win juicy bulk Internet access contracts from businesses. If one ISP promises to refund part of a monthly access bill for outages longer than 15 minutes, rivals raise the ante 10 minutes. SLAs are more than ISP hype to win your contracts. For many companies, Internet access is the key to e-mail or a network running any number of applications. Companies can no longer afford a chancy Internet connection. Many have built virtual private networks that run on the public Internet. VPNs are every bit as mission critical as networks companies have built themselves, and SLAs confer an extra measure of confidence they won't crash at a critical juncture. ''If you turn off the Internet for a day, you might as well send our research and development [department] home,'' says network administrator Jim Payne at ILC Dover, a Delaware maker of spacesuits and gas masks. So Payne negotiated a carefully crafted SLA with his ISP. ''The easiest way to cripple a plant is to stop e-mail.'' Besides infusing customer peace of mind, SLAs have forced ISPs to build more bulletproof networks. Otherwise, they wouldn't offer them. ''Customers don't really care that you will refund them if the [Internet] doesn't work. They care that it works all the time. The expectation is that we won't have to pay because our service really does work,'' says Rob Marschall, product marketing director for AT&T WorldNet Managed Internet Service, which offers an elaborate set of guarantees against failures. Like any legal document, SLAs can be tricky. Bear in mind that no ISP controls all the networks it uses. This is the Internet, where a simple request for a Web site can move across dozens of networks. Once an e-mail or Web site request exits the ISP's network through public interchanges such as MAE (merit access exchange) East, MAE West, or private peering points, performance and reliability are no longer under your provider's control. UUNet, for example, won't pay out if the local access network is the cause of an outage. Local access - the lines between your business and the ISP - are usually owned by the local telephone company, rendering UUNet powerless to control performance on this portion of the network. So examine what is covered in an SLA. UUNet will shortly change its policy and cover some local access in SLAs, says Alan Taffel, director of marketing at the Fairfax, Va., company. ''You don't have to control every element of the network to guarantee it. It's a matter of taking responsibility even if you don't control something. '' Whether it sticks to the tough penalties it currently ascribes to VPN outages remains to be seen. UUNet currently refunds 25 percent of a monthly bill for the first failure and 50 percent for the second. Clearly, UUNet, which covers performance and reliability under its VPN SLAs, fails ''infrequently,'' says Taffel. He can't recall an incident when a bill was refunded. Monthly VPN charges range from $5,000 to several million dollars, he adds. Typically, a company receives a day's worth of free service for a bulk Internet failure. VPNs, however, are easier to control since end points begin and end on the ISP's network. Access to the Internet is a one-way ticket off the ISP's network and into the happenstance of cyberspace. Rule of thumb: the lighter the penalties, the greater probability of problems. Inherently, SLAs are about the ability to control the Internet, which the Internet's originators, who believed in wide if not public ownership of their creation, might find disturbing. Control of the Internet's infrastructure falling into the hands of a smaller group runs counter to the high-minded notion of public ownership. On the other hand, the more industrial strength, the more attractive the Internet becomes to business. John Dodge is editor of PC Week and vice president of news for Ziff-Davis Inc. He welcomes e-mail at john dodge@zd.com. This story ran on page C04 of the Boston Globe on 07/22/98. c Copyright 1998 Globe Newspaper Company.