MCI Steps Up SLAs Worldwide

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MCI Steps Up SLAs Worldwide
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Rawlson O’Neil King, theWHIR.com
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July 27, 2004 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — MCI (mci.com)
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announced on Tuesday that it would raise the bar on its network
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performance by enhancing its service level agreements around the world.
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Effective immediately, for all new and
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existing customers, MCI will up its current threshold for performance
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and introduce new guarantees for traffic traveling between key global
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business centers.
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“If you were trying to build out a global
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network but were hesitant to deploy in an international location in the
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past because there were no guarantees, the new SLAs should address your
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concerns,” states Ralph Montfort, MCI’s director of Internet access
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services. “With our guarantees you can install a mission-critical
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application on an international IP link with piece of mind.”
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The new SLAs enforce more stringent
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latency measurements for Internet connections in Latin America, Europe
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and the Asia-Pacific region. Latency, the amount of time it takes for a
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data packet to move across a network connection, drops substantially
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under the new agreements.
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Data packet round-trips between Europe
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and North America drop from 95 milliseconds from 90. Round-trips within
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Japan drop from 35 milliseconds to 30. Between Hong Kong and the US,
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data is guaranteed to move at 230 milliseconds instead of 280
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milliseconds.
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The new slate of SLAs also introduces
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guarantees for new geographical locations and data routes. MCI now
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promises 99 percent availability for packet delivery between North
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America and Brazil, Venezuela, South Africa, India, intra-Europe, Korea
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and Taiwan.
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The company also pledges 99 percent
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availability between Hong Kong and Sydney as well as Singapore and
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Tokyo. Korea will also have enhanced access to Hong Kong, Sydney,
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Singapore and Tokyo, in addition to India. Taiwan and India will also
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have guaranteed data delivery to most of the major cities within the
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Pacific Rim.
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Under the terms of the new SLAs, 100
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percent availability is guaranteed to network services if the
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connection is ordered and provisioned by MCI, right down to the local
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loop. A one-day unconditional service credit is offered to customers
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for every hour of outage. If latency or packet delivery guarantees are
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violated, then a one-day service credit is also awarded.
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MCI says the new SLAs provide for
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proactive notification of any service interruption or service-level
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guarantee deviation, within 15 minutes of detection. MCI Internet
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customers can also monitor the performance of their connections
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themselves through an online customer service portal.
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“Our goal is to enhance our metrics,
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offering new guarantees on latency and data delivery, while trying to
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measure places that truly represent our customers’ traffic,” states
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Montfort. “We understand that IT personnel require metrics on service
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so that they can demonstrate to management that they will obtain a
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guarantee for services rendered.”
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To enhance the corporate end-user
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experience, MCI will also be introducing an SLA for its global dial-up
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Internet network in the fall. Using MCI’s dial analysis platform,
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enterprise customers will be able to measure end-user performance
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against new end-to-end SLAs.
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Corporate users will now be guaranteed no
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busy signals or unanswered calls, a call success rate equal to or
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greater than 90 percent and an average initial connect speed equal to
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or greater than 40 KBPS.
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“With the dial-up SLA, you can guarantee
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to senior executives who travel extensively that MCI is a tier-one
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remote access provider whose service is available whenever they require
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it,” says Montfort.
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The new SLAs are part of MCI’s new
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strategy. The firm, which recently emerged from a near-fatal bout of
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bankruptcy, also plans to introduce a host of next-generation Ethernet
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capabilities that extend corporate local area networks into IP-ready
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wide area networks.
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The new strategy comes as MCI recently
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resumed trading on the Nasdaq and as telecommunication analysts
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speculate on whether the firm will be subject to a takeover bid by
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Sprint (sprint.com) or a Baby Bell.
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