Verizon Business announced today it is now offering a higher service-level agreement (SLAs) as part of its Managed IP PBX Services, incorporating not just traditional measurements such as mean-time to repair but also more subjective dimensions including a mean opinion score (MOS)..

The new SLAs lead with a promise to have Managed IP PBX issues resolved in three-and-a-half hours or less. Other carriers typically offer a time-to-repair commitment based on an average time, not an actual-time-to-repair, said Laurie Shook, director of IP PBX service for Verizon Business Services. Additionally, Verizon is extending a number of other commitments to Managed IP PBX, such as up to 100 percent platform availability and proactive notification of an issue within 15 minutes or less. The SLAs also include a credit payout of up to 100 percent of the monthly recurring charge for missed metrics averaged over a month.

“What we’re moving into is use of measurements that more closely approaches the experience of users,” Shook said.

With the MOS scores, which are based on a 1.0 to 5.0 scale in which 5 is the best possible quality, the company is guaranteeing an average MOS score of 4.0.

“The whole MOS score set up was designed to take into account a lot of people’s opinions,” Shook said.

At the same time, the company is taking a bit of a risk because VoIP quality often is dependent on so many different elements including the quality of the local area network. To avoid that last link to the desktop from creating a problem, Verizon runs network assessments on all Managed IP PBX customers through a network assessment before installation.

“So many customers with their existing LAN infrastructure aren’t ready to just pop voice on top of that,” Shook said.

It’s also basing the MOS score on customers using G.711 codecs for voice compression. “If someone elects to put a more compressed codec it’s a slightly lower MOS score,” she said.