8x8 (News - Alert), a unified communications systems provider, recently announced that it is pushing the boundaries of service availability and voice call quality with a new service level agreement (SLA) that it will make available to select enterprise customers.

The company is calling its new agreement the “Performance Assured” SLA. It says the agreement will address connection speeds as they relate to service providers as well as connections at clients' places of business that ultimately control VoIP service uptime and quality. The new license will be multi-faceted in that it can apply to any type of broadband network including public Internet, multiprotocol label switching, and dual MLPS/public Internet networks.

Mehdi Salour (News - Alert), the senior vice president of network operations and support at 8x8, says the new SLA grew out of 8x8's commitment to delivering quality VoIP connections through the public Internet.

“8x8 has invested significant engineering and operations resources to perfect the delivery of VoIP over the public Internet,” Salour said. “The technologies we have invented and the relentless effort we have made to measure availability and service quality for every call have given us the data we need to provide our customers with this new service level agreement.”

The technical details of what this license guarantees are, according to 8x8, the best in the industry. The SLA states that its customers will have greater than 99.99 percent uptime and a mean opinion score of at least 3.0 for at least 98 percent of VoIP calls employees handle on their networks. The mean opinion score refers to the public opinion about audio quality and ranges from one to five with five being the best and three rated as “fair.” TMC (News - Alert) has noted in previous reports that customer opinion of audio quality can be important to understanding the overall nature of a call.

What this type of license means for 8x8 is that it is placing its own technology out there for everyone to see. Years of development are now on the line and offered to customers as a guarantee that they will receive exceptional service no matter what happens outside 8x8's control. The claim may be considered bold, but the company insists that its dedication to the field alongside its other software – such as its Virtual Office Analytics – can give end users the confidence to use VoIP consistently and identify any issues in their own networks that may cause call quality to diminish.