On Sat, 29 Dec 2001, Kevin Gannon wrote:
Guys sorry to jump in mid thread, however some of you might know how do the voice carriers handle SLA's. I know our telco voice guys seem to live on SLA's.
I can not rember the last time there was any kind of widespread voice outage on an international network.
Telephone companies use SLA's to exclude many types of outages from their reporting statistics. Large telephone users (telemarketers, call centers, etc) have many of the same difficulties data people have with carriers. Third-party measurements of telephone call completion rates come up with much lower numbers than the carriers report. The international telephone network is extremely vulnerable to congestion. And several developing countries have almost perpetual problems with their telephone systems. "Widespread" is one of those vague terms. If your phone works, is it a widespread problem? Not even the ITU collects statistics on the performance of the global telephone network. Even monopoly PTTs consider it proprietary information.