A service level agreement sets the availability a carrier commits to, often 99.9 or 99.99 percent a month, and the credit you receive when it falls short. The credit is real money, usually a percentage of that month's charge for the affected service, scaled by how long it was down. It is also one of the easiest things in telecom to leave on the table.
Why credits go unclaimed
- The claim must be made within a window, commonly 30 days after the outage, and the outage is forgotten by then.
- The carrier measures downtime from the moment a ticket was opened, not from when the circuit went down.
- The credit must be requested in writing; it is never applied automatically.
- Nobody kept the ticket number, the start time or the restore time.
What to record during every outage
Four facts settle a claim: when the service stopped, when the ticket was opened and its number, when the service was restored, and which circuit or account it concerned. Open the ticket the moment you know the service is down, even before you have confirmed the cause, because the carrier's clock starts at the ticket. Note the restore time yourself rather than relying on the carrier's closure, which can be hours later.
How to calculate what you are owed
Find the SLA in the contract or the carrier's service schedule. It will state the monthly availability target and a table of credits: for example, a credit of five percent of the monthly charge for the first hour of excess downtime and more for each hour after, up to a cap. Work out the hours of downtime beyond what the target allows, read the credit off the table, and apply it to the monthly charge for that circuit. Write the calculation into the claim so the carrier only has to agree with it.
How to claim
Send the claim in writing to the account team and to the billing dispute address, inside the window, with the ticket number, the times, the calculation and the account number. Ask for the credit to appear on a named invoice, then check that invoice when it arrives. If the carrier disputes the times, your own record of when the circuit stopped answering is the evidence; a carrier's own monitoring rarely contradicts a customer who has it.
DemarcLabs tracks each outage against the carrier ticket and the SLA on file, logs the start and restore times, and says how much is owed, how long you have to claim it and who to ask. Circuit Watch records the outage automatically for any circuit it monitors.