[ghshephard]

SLAs aren't necessarily 100% guarantees. It's not unreasonable to expect that a Broadband provider will provide advertised speeds some reasonable percent of the usage time - say "100% of advertised speeds 95% of the month, < 75% of advertised speeds for no more than two hours/month" - or some such SLA. I'd be willing to pay a bit more for those assurances.

Suggesting that Broadband providers should be held accountable, at least to some degree, for their advertised speeds doesn't cut it with me.

[abalashov]

The thing about SLAs is - as they are conventionally provided in the mainstream - that they're largely meaningless in terms of the provider's liabilities if the fail to honour the commitment.

Not only is the burden of proof on the user to show that the provider did not meet the committed information rate at a particular time, but you don't really get to collect anything.

Forget residential/consumer-grade broadband connections; even the business-class, "dedicated" connections like point-to-point leased circuits (e.g. T1s) that typically do come with SLAs don't give you much bang. A typical SLA about T1 uptime, for instance, will offer to credit the user by prorating their monthly rate proportionally to any downtime.

OK, so, I'm paying $400/mo for a T1 and it goes down for a whole day. 400 / 30 = $13.34. So, I get about $13 back. If I've got an office of 10 people I'm paying an average of $16/hr to work in an Internet-dependent way, we shall say conservatively, that means that I just paid $1280 for 10 people to sit on their butt, not to mention lost business and other arguable opportunity costs, etc, etc. In any event, it's obvious that $13 doesn't cover the business impact of the outage, even in a commonsensical sort of way.

No provider would take the risk of crediting you the entire rate - or even half - for a day's outage or something like that.

Besides, if you're dealing with anyone but the telco and/or cable MSO that actually owns and operates most of the facilities involved, the issues involved in circuit repair are so phenomenally out of the control of the ISP that the exposure would just be insane. And if you are dealing with the actual megacorp, their repair processes are so bureaucratised and slow that they wouldn't take the hit on the MTTR (Mean Time To Resolution) either.

[Retric]

The goal of a SLA is to insure that the service is up most of the time and can provide a given bandwidth most of the time. If you really want to have high up time you need 2 or more independent connections. T1 + cable works just fine. It's not about preventing downtime so much as reducing the window for a double failure.

PS: You can get an SLA that covers double time with a per indecent penalty, the ISP really will hop to fix the problem, but costs even more.