UK firms pick up £35m bill for ISP downtime

ISPs are failing to meet their own service level agreements (SLAs) and the shortfall is costing UK business up to £35m a year.

According to a survey by internet monitoring company iowatch, UK business websites crash at total of 60,500 times a day. On average, each website crashes 18 times a month, experiencing 127 minutes of downtime in total.

Simon Scott, finance director at iowatch, said the figures prove that many ISPs are misleading customers with service level promises that are clearly not achievable.

He added that, in some cases, customers should demand to be refunded for revenue lost during periods of downtime.

Scott told silicon.com: "I'm sure this will rattle a few cages but we are aiming for transparency and hope they [ISPs] will join us."

He added that it was irresponsible for some ISPs to advertise SLAs as high as 99.99 per cent as this level was clearly not sustainable. Scott said high figures were advertised to compete with the levels promised by competitors.

However, ISPs have refuted the survey's findings and claim the software iowatch used to conduct the research is "flawed".

Steve Rawlinson, chief technical officer at clara.net, slammed the results and said the testing conducted by iowatch was "spurious".

Rawlinson added: "iowatch's testing software is flawed and, as such, if it doesn't get a response within a certain time period it assumes the connection is down and records it as such. The mistake could well be at the iowatch end."

A source at another ISP said the software is completely automated and added: "If a firewall is in place and the software is not able to penetrate it, it will again assume that the connection is down."

Graham Fisher, analyst at Bloor Research, said businesses need to be reasonable with their expectations and assess how realistic their ISP's SLA is.

He added that he does not believe ISPs perform as well as they could but said those who have more reasonable SLAs should have better relations with their customers.

clara.net's Rawlinson added there is a penalty clause within SLAs and said shorter contracts would better serve customers.

He added: "They can always change to another ISP if they are not happy with the service."

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