North American Network Operators Group

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90% capacity loss - Business as usual?

  • From: Sean Donelan
  • Date: Tue Nov 28 07:14:39 2000

Perhaps the opposite of an 99.999% SLA, just how bad do things need to
get before its a problem?  Time after time, I've seen networks incapable
of carrying 90%+ of its normal traffic, or unusable for its intended
purpose. But the PR spokespeople never admit its an "outage."

"Larry Plumb, Verizon spokesperson, said that as of Monday there had
been no network outages in the Northeast region, just some slow
throughput problems. This, despite a voice mail message at its main
customer support number telling customers to remain patient until
technicians resolved the problem. 

Repeated requests for information were ignored"

http://www.internetnews.com/isp-news/article/0,,8_518561,00.html

Ok, so the word "outage" is verboten for PR people.  The electric utility
industry has the same issue with the word "blackout."  Instead there are
sustained service anomalies.  Which lets utilities say with a straight face
they've had no blackouts.

Instead of an SLA, do we need a SLG (Service Level Glossary)?