For example, 99 percent sounds pretty good until you look at the numbers. Assuming 720 hours in a month, maintaining 99 percent availability could allow up to seven hours, per month, of downtime--not a staggering number, but certainly not good for a 24x7 Web site. Furthermore, having an SLA with your provider is kind of like having your local Bell promise you uninterrupted access to that region. Step outside of its territory, however, and all bets are off. We found that most network managers agree that though nice, the proposed compensation for outages don't hold much water. A day's credit for a few hours of downtime is not exactly an even trade--there is rarely compensation for loss of service.

On the flip side, some SLAs do hold promise for those looking into VPN (virtual private network) services. Sprint, for example, guarantees a delay of 140 milliseconds or less between sites on its backbone. Numerous issues surround VPN deployment, but they all pale in comparison to the problem of unusable speeds. As SLAs catch on, and providers attempt to catch up to the curve, guarantees like Sprint's will help make the Internet usable for emerging technologies.

Complaints aside, the bottom line is that the Internet just isn't at the point where end-to-end guarantees are feasible. No provider in its right mind is going to pledge the availability of someone on the other side of the fence--and rightfully so: Not everyone is attached to an ISP that is capable of functioning at an enterprise level.

ANS Communications
ANS Communications bridges the gap between the diversity typically found in small ISPs and the robustness of tier 1 service providers. The original maintainer of the National Science Foundation (NSF) backbone, ANS has drawn upon its years of experience to soar above the competition. Scoring high marks from its customers for accessibility, reliability and responsiveness, ANS is one of the few providers of this magnitude to still have the common touch that network managers have grown to love.

At the core of ANS' backbone is a partial mesh of DS-3 and OC-3-based connections in a routed infrastructure. Although neither the fastest nor the largest, ANS' spine represents consistency and stability to its client base. ANS customers had few complaints about network latency or outages and reported that most outages were discovered by ANS support engineers before customers were even aware of them. We found it interesting that the majority of the complaints with the larger ISPs like MCI, Sprint and UUNET were communications-based. With ANS' aggressive notification process and persistent follow-up procedures, communication is one area that ANS has clearly mastered.

After interviewing numerous clients, we found that a few of the larger organizations not only connected to ANS, but also to Sprint, MCI, UUNET and GTE. One client reported its 100 Mbps of aggregate bandwidth is split across four ISPs, and it had the least amount of problems with ANS. But the praise doesn't stop at connectivity. ANS' Ann Arbor, Mich.- based NOC (network operations center) received the highest marks among all participating providers. Customers reported that calls to the NOC are answered immediately--zero hold time. Level 1 technicians can answer most questions, and follow-up calls are consistent. One customer even referenced an incident where its site was experiencing connectivity failure to a business partner. The technician who answered the call tracked the problem to a peering point, looked at the routing tables, and then contacted a network engineer to coordinate with the neighboring ISP. From start to finish, the entire process took less than 20 minutes. This type of response, from the initial phone call to an engineering solution within minutes, is unparalleled in the industry.

Unlike other providers that are caving under their current loads, ANS is looking to continue consistent growth while keeping within optimum operating parameters. A pioneer of private peering, ANS has grown with its network and steers clear of over-subscription.

Other value-added services include detailed bandwidth reports, firewall and intrusion-detection services, and Web hosting on both Unix and Windows NT platforms. As a nonfacilities-based provider, if ANS can keep up with growth while maintaining the level of customer support that it currently provides, then there could have be profitable years ahead of it.