VANCOUVER, Wash., April 29 /PRNewswire/ -- Electric Lightwave Inc.
(Nasdaq: ELIX), one of the nation's fastest-growing providers of Internet
access solutions to the growing Web-centric and bandwidth intensive business
community, today announced service level guarantees and a "looking glass"
feature that unveils the real-time performance of its premier fiber-optic data
network to the world.
"Internet providers often tout Internet service level guarantees, but they
don't hand customers an easy, no nonsense way to check a company's network
performance 24 hours a day, seven days a week," said Richard Shimizu, ELI's
marketing director of data and video services. "We can, because the quality
of our premier Internet backbone gives us the confidence to know we can
deliver the very highest level of Internet connectivity."
Electric Lightwave's new Internet feature gives everyone a looking glass,
so to speak, to spy on its network performance and Internet connectivity.
That way, Electric Lightwave customers, or anyone who has Internet access, can
view the company's network performance statistics and even conduct custom data
tests of speed and accuracy between cities that matter most to them.
The "looking glass" feature is at: http://www.eli.net/sla-stats
"'Looking glass' is an invitation for the entire Internet backbone
industry to open up their own networks, as we are, to prove their claims of
speed and reliability. We are proud of our level of service and want our
customers and prospective customers to see our numbers," Shimizu said.
Electric Lightwave's service level agreement guarantees levels of
performance in packet delivery, latency and service provisioning. Service
level guarantees include:
* Monthly average packet delivery of 97.5 percent within ELI's Internet
backbone. Packet delivery measures whether your data makes it to the
destination on the first attempt;
* Monthly average roundtrip latency of 80 milliseconds between backbone
routers. Latency measures the speed at which your data travels from one
point to another and;
* Provisioning of 15 business days for on-net service and 45 business days
for off-net service. Provisioning relates to the number of days between
when a customer's order for service enters ELI's order system and
activation of the service.
If Electric Lightwave does not meet its service level guarantees, it will
issue customers credits, ranging from one day's prorated monthly recurring
charge to 50 percent off non-recurring charges for initial service.
The packet delivery and latency statistics shown on the Web pages are the
result of a series of pings directly between ELI's routers for the selected
cities shown using the extended ping feature in Cisco's IOS. No effort is
made to choose the best measurements for any given city where multiple routers
exist; it simply presents the data for a single router in each city.
Most Internet-backbone statistics are based on ping scripts running on
UNIX workstations instead of a router-based version. However, UNIX hosts show
packet statistics based on a single point of origin for the tests; ELI
presents a matrix where each router in the list runs the full set of ping
tests between all other routers in the list. This offers the viewer the
opportunity to examine packet delivery statistics between cities that are of
interest to their own traffic and not just from the perspective of a single
UNIX host.
About Electric Lightwave
Electric Lightwave Inc. is a leading integrated communications provider of
enhanced data services, frame relay, ATM and Internet access solutions to
bandwidth intensive businesses and the growing e-commerce market.
The company provides long distance, data and prepaid services nationwide,
with points-of-presence in Atlanta, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, Denver,
Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New York, Palo Alto, Philadelphia, San Diego,
San Francisco, San Jose and Washington, D.C.
As a full-service provider, the company offers businesses local, long
distance and prepaid telephone service, videoconferencing and high-speed
broadband transport that interconnects major markets in the West, including
Seattle, Sacramento, Salt Lake City, Phoenix, Boise, Spokane and Portland,
Ore.,
Headquartered in Vancouver, Wash., the company employs 1,200 and earned
revenues of $101 million in 1998, up 65 percent from 1997. Additional
information about Electric Lightwave Inc. is located on the World Wide Web at
http://www.eli.net and http://data.eli.net.
*The "looking glass" feature is based on a shareware product developed by
Digex, http://nitrous.digex.net
SOURCE Electric Lightwave Inc.
 back to top
Related links:
http://www.eli.net
Company News On-Call:
http://www.prnewswire.com/comp/117258.html or fax,
800-758-5804, ext. 117258
CONTACT:
Jack Hardy, Corporate Communications Manager,
360-816-3602, or jack_hardy@eli.net, or Susan Farmer, Public
Relations Manager, 360-816-4518, or susan_farmer@eli.net, both of
Electric Lightwave Inc.
|
