Understanding SLA: Why 99.999% Uptime Matters

When evaluating business internet providers, the Service Level Agreement (SLA) is often overlooked in favor of price and speed comparisons. Yet the SLA determines what happens when things go wrong, and things eventually go wrong.

What is an SLA?

A Service Level Agreement is a contractual commitment from your provider that defines:

Guaranteed uptime percentage
Maximum time to repair issues
Network performance metrics (latency, jitter, packet loss)
Financial credits when guarantees are not met
Support response time commitments

Consumer and basic business broadband typically has NO SLA. When service goes down, you wait until it is fixed with no recourse.

Uptime Percentages Explained

The difference between 99% and 99.999% uptime is massive:

Uptime	Downtime per Year	Downtime per Month
99%	3.65 days	7.3 hours
99.9%	8.76 hours	43.8 minutes
99.99%	52.6 minutes	4.4 minutes
99.999%	5.26 minutes	26.3 seconds

At 99% uptime, you could experience over 87 hours of downtime per year. At 99.999% (five nines), that drops to just 5 minutes annually.

The Cost of Downtime

Industry research consistently shows the high cost of network outages:

Average cost across all businesses: $5,600 per minute (Gartner)
Small business average: $137-$427 per minute (ITIC)
E-commerce sites: $12,000+ per minute during peak periods
Financial services: $6,000+ per minute

Beyond direct revenue loss, downtime impacts:

Employee productivity
Customer satisfaction and retention
Brand reputation
Compliance and regulatory standing

What to Look for in an SLA

Uptime guarantee: Look for 99.99% or higher for mission-critical operations. Understand what counts as downtime and how it is measured.

Mean Time to Repair (MTTR): This defines how quickly the provider commits to resolving issues. Enterprise-grade service offers 4-hour MTTR or better.

Credit structure: How are you compensated when SLA is missed? Look for meaningful credits, not token gestures.

Performance metrics: Beyond uptime, look for guarantees on latency, jitter, and packet loss, especially for VoIP and video.

Support commitments: What are the response time guarantees? Is 24/7 support included or extra?

Red Flags in SLAs

Watch out for these common issues:

Scheduled maintenance excluded from uptime calculations
Credits capped at a small percentage of monthly fee
Complex claim processes that discourage filing
Vague language around what constitutes an outage
No MTTR commitment

FiberFed SLA Highlights

Our enterprise SLA includes:

99.999% uptime guarantee
4-hour mean time to repair
Proactive monitoring with NOC notification
Meaningful service credits
24/7 direct NOC access
No excuses, no finger-pointing