Frequently Asked Questions
What is the definition of a Tier-1 carrier?
What does NTT’s customer care service cover?
What is 95 percentile billing?
What is the Backbone SLA?
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What is the definition of a Tier-1 carrier?
A Tier-1 carrier is an ISP that:
- Owns and manages a worldwide high-capacity IP backbone
- Does not depend on an ”upper” provider to maintain quality of service
- Connected to all other Tier-1 carriers and many customers
Tier-1 providers have their own coast-to-coast backbone and peering relationships with most other Tier-1 providers. Tier-2 providers get access from Tier-1 providers, but usually have to pay for it - unlike the free peering relationships that Tier-1 providers share. Tier-3 providers generally specialise in a regional presence.
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What does NTT’s customer care service cover?
The quality of customer service is one of a number of core attributes that distinguish NTT in the market place. NTT offers comprehensive service level agreements (SLAs), customer support centres and an industry-leading, online customer service centre that provides customers with accurate, real-time information to help them run their businesses. NTT aims to deliver the best possible service for all its customers through reliable, uninterrupted, on-time service delivery and up-to-date service information from helpful, courteous and pro-active staff.
Customer Support Centre
The customer support centre provides a single point of contact for all support issues. It deals with fault management for all NTT services and pro-actively handles planned work notifications, co-ordination and policing.
The centre is located within our Network Operation Centres (NOCs) in London and Dallas, to provide full 24 x 7/365 monitoring across different time zones with redundant back-up should one of the centres become unavailable.
Customer care staff fluent in English, Japanese and other European and local languages are available on every shift. All are technically astute and will be able to provide you with the support you need.
NTT actively drives SLAs to make sure our commitments are met to your complete satisfaction. The global IP sales team and their service managers have a direct link to global network management to help resolve customer queries and issues. Customers have dedicated support from service managers for provisioning and implementation.
Web-based monitoring
Our web-based monitoring tool enables you to track the progress of your requests online. You can also use it to monitor the fault management process and view current quality of service statistics and service-affecting maintenance. NTT plans to expand this facility to include online ordering and electronic billing, ultimately providing a self-service tool for customising content delivery to your individual needs.
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What is 95 percentile billing?
We continually monitor the connection into your server, 24 x 7, taking a sample of the bandwidth every five minutes. At the end of the month, the samples are sorted into descending order and the top 5% (usage peaks) removed. The remaining highest sample is then used to calculate that month’s billing.
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What is the Backbone SLA?
The Global IP Network Service is backed by a service level agreement (SLA) with clear performance objectives and commitments for availability, latency and packet loss. If service levels do not meet what is guaranteed, NTT will issue a credit according to the Terms and Conditions of the IP Transit Service.