Now, having said all that, and having been one of the people who've attempted to communicate sane, rational, technical ideas to marketing and legal the chance that anything sane made it in the actual contract is, well, nil.
I disagree. If someone takes the trouble to publish a technical document describing a sane technical way to measure a network SLA, and they also provide code for measuring/calculating the SLA, then there is a good chance that the industry will pick it up. Look at 95th percentile billing. Dave Rand at Abovenet thought it up, probably to simplify the billing process and keep billing overhead costs down. Then UUNet picked it up and suddenly just about everyone was offering a 95th percentile billing model. -- Michael Dillon