By Tony Hallett, 14 October 2003 13:42
NEWS Sprint has launched a service level agreement (SLA) initiative that it reckons will propel it into the top tier of carriers offering global networks. The US operator has come out of the telecoms trough and its failed Global One alliance with France Telecom and Deutsche Telekom in fair financial health and reckons its growing network, exclusively based on equipment from Cisco, allows it to offer user organisations aggressive SLAs others won’t be able to match. Howard Janzen, Sprint’s president Global Markets Group, said: "This is not a particularly good industry to look at for customer satisfaction and loyalty." Because of that Sprint is from today offering simplified SLAs across its data portfolio, to both new and existing customers, which take into account voice and video over IP and, in one case, offer 100 per cent credits for broken promises – though the company isn’t expecting many total refunds. For services such as IP VPNs between sites around the world, there is a generally accepted top tier of vendors that includes Equant and Infonet and normally AT&T, BT, C&W and MCI in some people’s eyes. Sprint now says it can be in that elite group. Sprint will add wholly-owned points-of-presence (POPs) around the world and said it isn’t just targeting US headquartered multinationals. One of its big customers is Samsung, though the Korean conglomerate uses a number of carriers. The analyst community has continually called for straightforward SLAs from carriers and yesterday saw rival < a href="http://www.silicon.com/news/170-500001/1/6391.html">C&W announce it can offer quality of service on IP VPN traffic around the world that uses MPLS for speed and flexibility . Sprint’s three classes of SLA will be classified as network node-to-node, end-to-end and managed.
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