Verizon Business is once again enhancing its already industry-leading suite of service level agreements for Private IP customers by extending its performance commitments for real-time applications, including VoIP and video, beyond the edge of Verizon Business' network all the way to customers' physical locations. Specifically, the company will offer extended jitter, packet delay and packet delivery ratio SLAs to the customer edge, including local access lines.

The new Customer Edge SLAs apply to U.S. and international locations and are available at no additional cost to U.S.-based managed or customer-managed Private IP customers, with availability planned for all Private IP customers by year-end. Verizon Business offers a credit of 20 percent of a customer's monthly recurring charges if any Customer Edge SLA is not met.

"Verizon Business continues to set the pace for excellence in IP networking, and we're standing by our products and customers to deliver one of the most solid and robust foundations for IP success," said Mike Marcellin, vice president of product marketing with Verizon Business. "By building these SLAs directly into our Private IP service and not requiring additional costly equipment, our customers benefit from some of the most stringent service level commitments available today."

Courtney Munroe, vice president with IDC, an industry analyst research firm, said, "Continued growth in real-time voice and video applications over the wide area network has resulted in a need for stronger performance level SLAs. Verizon Business' new Customer Edge SLAs provide a strong commitment to deliver the robust end-to-end performance that global enterprises are demanding."

Jitter represents the variation in packet arrival time between customer locations and can commonly affect a user's satisfaction with real time application performance, such as VoIP and video over IP. Verizon Business' new Customer Edge Jitter SLA provides that the monthly average jitter in the network will remain at an acceptable quality level for voice and video across the enterprise.

Packet delay represents the efficiency of packet delivery between customer sites and can affect the perceived wait-time for users operating specific applications on a network.

The new Packet Delay Customer Edge SLA combines the existing Provider Edge Packet Delay SLA with the length of a customer's local access line to determine a more comprehensive threshold.

Packet delivery ratio measures the effectiveness of transport when taking into account packet loss. The ratio expresses the percentage of packets successfully delivered between customer sites compared with any packets dropped.

The new Packet Delivery Ratio Customer Edge SLA provides additional commitments that priority traffic takes into account packet loss between the Verizon Business network and the customer sites in an effort to retain acceptable packet loss for real-time application transmission. For example, all traffic marked for highest priority (real rime voice), such as VoIP, will receive a 99.99 percent SLA commitment, meaning that customers are eligible for a credit if more than just 0.01 percent of the traffic is dropped.

These new SLAs join Verizon Business' recently announced SLAs available to all Private IP customers, including a mean opinion score SLA of 4.0 to measure voice quality based on an industry-accepted method of listener ratings, and an enhanced time to repair SLA based on the amount of time taken to restore service during an outage, rather than the average or mean time to repair service outages commonly used in the industry.

Verizon Business' Private IP service, available in more than 121 countries and territories, is an ideal platform for converged services, as it allows for prioritization of applications via six classes of service. An organization can customize prioritization so that business-critical applications receive a higher priority across the organization's network. Real time CoS makes Private IP ideal for carrying latency-sensitive traffic such as VoIP and digital video.