A business internet SLA evaluation that starts with an uptime percentage — 99.9, 99.99, “four nines on the port” — usually fails at the first unmeasured hop, not at the first decimal. An uptime percentage is a marketing shorthand. It is not the brief. If you do not write what is actually measured, who measures it, which failures sit outside the calculation, how a credit is requested, and whether a credit is even the outcome you care about, the next attractive nine still controls the comparison.
This page is the first evaluation brief. It is not a carrier scorecard. It is the set of questions that keep a percentage from being treated as a service commitment.
Why a percentage is not the evaluation
A published availability number can describe a port, a last-mile loop, a backbone, or a blended average that never names your building. It can exclude scheduled maintenance, force majeure, customer equipment, power, or any event the provider did not cause. Two quotes can show the same percentage and cover different things.
Credits are not continuity. A monthly credit that requires you to notice, open a case in a specific window, and accept a fraction of one invoice does not restore payments, voice, or identity while the path is down. If the business impact of an hour offline is larger than the credit, the SLA is a commercial footnote, not the resilience design. Resilience still has to be written as failure domains and a degraded state. The live note on why two circuits are not a redundancy design is the companion when a second path is being used as a substitute for reading the SLA.
Latency, jitter, and packet-loss commitments matter when voice, video, or payments ride the same circuit. An availability number that is silent on those fields is incomplete for that work. Mean time to repair, response targets, and who is allowed to open a severity-one case are often more useful than another nine — if they are written, owned, and tested.
What belongs on the SLA brief
Before anyone treats an uptime percentage as a comparable commitment, fill these rows:
- Decision identity: new service, replacement, upgrade, or a multi-site standard — plus the work that makes availability a business question rather than a brochure line.
- What is measured: port, loop, provider network, end-to-end path, or something else. Write the demarcation. If customer equipment, power, or inside wiring is excluded, say so in the brief, not after an outage.
- How it is measured: provider tools, customer tools, a third-party probe, and whose clock wins a dispute. A percentage without a method is a claim.
- What is excluded: maintenance windows, the notice required, force-majeure language, and events on the customer side of the handoff.
- Performance fields: latency, jitter, packet loss, and throughput — with the reason each field matters for this site’s work.
- Remedy: credit formula, claim window, evidence required, and whether chronic failure gives you an exit, a repair obligation, or only another credit.
- Operations: who is notified, who opens the case, after-hours coverage, and what “restore” means — link up, application up, or a written acceptance.
- Relationship to backup: if a second path exists, the SLA on the primary does not describe failover. Write both.
The business internet quote-readiness checklist is the companion when the next step is a shared request so unlike SLA language is not scored as one monthly total. The redundancy and failover requirements worksheet is the companion when the real requirement is independence, not a credit.
Questions that belong in the first meeting
Ask the incumbent or a challenger to show, not describe:
- The exact sentence that defines availability, including exclusions, and an example month where a credit would and would not apply.
- Who measures the path, where the probe sits, and what happens if the customer’s reading disagrees.
- Response and restore targets for a complete outage versus a degraded path that still passes a ping.
- How latency or packet-loss commitments are proven, and whether voice or payment work is in that proof.
- Whether chronic failure creates an exit or only a stack of credits.
If those answers are an uptime percentage and a promised credit table, you do not have a business internet SLA evaluation. You have a brochure number.
What this page is not
This is not a carrier ranking, not a nine-counting contest, and not a claim that The Data Partner already negotiated anyone’s credit schedule. Skip incentive talk, skip uptime slides as a substitute for a measurement method, and skip any suggestion that a percentage replaces a degraded-state design. Write the rows. Then compare commitments in the same format. If you want a second set of eyes on the brief, start with a conversation.