What I find interesting isn't Ameritech's long repair times, but how do providers promise 4 hour repair times when the dominant local loop provider takes over a day to fix something on a good day.
Repair time promises are marketing tools, just like X% availablity SLAs. They don't really think all repairs will happen in the stated time, nor do they think all customers will have X% availability. What they do thinl is that in most months, most customers won't go down. And they'll pay the penalty to the rest, because those that do go down might well be down longer than the stated repair time and it might well drive availability below the guaranteed level. They don't have to *ever* fix something in under 4 hours just because they offer such a guarantee, because they will still live up to the guarantee to most customers (i.e. customers that never go down). Ask for an SLA that pays you, say, $100,000 if they miss the mark. You won't get it, because know they're going to miss the mark. They can afford to do so, as long as they don't miss it often, and they keep the costs of missing it low enough. -- Brett