Service Level Agreements for the Final User

We recently hired a broadband Internet service from Turbonett. Like most companies here, they hand out a contract which is more liability-oriented, and they force its validity for a year or more, with excessive penalties for the customer if he/she should finish the contract before the specified period. There's a huge flaw in the whole business, nevertheless: there are no service level agreements (SLA).

SLAs for an ISP would include guaranteed uptime, penalties for downtimes that exceed such uptime, technical support levels like response and resolution times, information privacy, penalties for service misuse, etc. It is common sense to even include a contract invalidation statement in the aforementioned document. As with most companies here in El Salvador, this is not the case.

The Turbonett ADSL broadband Internet service contract, includes a statement that implies that the contract could be terminated if a "low quality" has been observed in service delivery. This would be fine if it wasn't so general. At the end (according to the sales representative that handed us the contract), the company would analyze any complaint the customer has regarding service, and, if such is desired, would terminate the contract. With such poor specification of "quality", it just doesn't make sense that liabilities of the service provider are at the sole discretion of it. Service could be poor, but the company wouldn't just want to lose to the customer and damage its position in the market.

We have been with one of the competitors for more than seven years. They didn't specified any SLAs, either, and I bet we could have forced a termination of one-year contracts by solely basing on the quality of the service delivered. In the first year, we experienced lots of downtimes and bandwidth problems.

Mobile and telecommunications companies alike don't usually have SLAs for the non-corporate customer, in any of their services (fixed phone lines, mobile phone lines, VoIP, hosting, etc.). We really need a change of such imposing, one-sided contracts, where the customer is hand-tied and with no options after signing. We are just tired of such bad treatment.