Business Internet SLA Explained

What an SLA is and is not

An SLA is not a promise that the circuit will not go down. It is an agreement about what the carrier owes you when it does.

Read it as a refund policy with a stopwatch attached, and it stops being confusing.

What the uptime numbers allow

Note that no single circuit realistically delivers five nines. That number comes from two diverse circuits and hardware that fails over between them.

The clause that matters more than uptime

Mean time to repair. Uptime percentage is measured across a year, so a single ugly outage can still technically meet the target.

MTTR is the commitment that gets you back online today. Four hours is a strong commitment. Next business day is not really a commitment at all.

Where the exclusions live

• Scheduled maintenance, which usually does not count as downtime at all.
• Anything the carrier attributes to your equipment, your power, or your building.
• Force majeure, written broadly enough to cover most weather.
• Last mile delivered by another carrier, which is sometimes excluded from the headline SLA entirely.
• Credits capped at a percentage of one month, and only paid if you formally request them inside a short window.

The practical reading

SLA credits will never come close to covering what an outage costs you. That is not what they are for. Their real value is that a carrier with a four hour MTTR commitment builds a support process capable of meeting it, and you get routed into that process.

You are buying the operational posture more than the refund.