From: I Am Not An Isp <patrick@ianai.net> Naturally - they make a lot more money lying to you and then paying the penalty when they get caught. Like 100% SLAs - a provider who offers a 100% SLA *knows* they can't actually meet their guarantee, so they budget in $X for payment of the penalties. And sometimes they even make the process ridiculous to get your refund.

If they get caught, the penalty can be pretty high. When you sell a service that you don't actually provide, you can be changed with fraud and treble damages. Under the uniform commercial code, selling a product that works half as well as specified, you still have to refund the entire price, no half discount. As I understand it, after the Milan Michigan cut a few years ago, MCI had to refund (to a major auto company) the _entire_ amount of the contract from its beginning, as they had never provided the physically redundant circuits specified in the contract. No matter that they provided _some_ service that worked up until the cut -- they didn't provide the service specified in the contract. And to retain the rest of the contract, MCI had to put in a redundant fiber -- right down the center of Ann Arbor, at huge expense, including millions resurfacing some roads that had just been resurfaced a couple of years before, and (I've heard) paying 40 dollars per foot per year for the easements. NB: Too bad Merit doesn't have as good lawyers.... They were hit by the same cut, and I'm not sure they even got a refund. I guess the moral is, the contract is only as good as the amount of money that you are willing to spend on lawyers. WSimpson@UMich.edu Key fingerprint = 17 40 5E 67 15 6F 31 26 DD 0D B9 9B 6A 15 2C 32