ITU-T Recommendations

The liberalization and deregulation process that started during the last decade in the telecommunication's environment is still running and it is cause of meaningful changes. Increasing competition, favoured also by customer performance requirements, produces big pressures upon service/network providers. The latter, after having faced especially cost reductions for several years, nowadays try to improve quality of service (QoS) in order to differentiate their products from those of their competitors.In addition the situation is complicated by the increasing demand of global services which involve in their provisioning several service/network providers. Therefore, roles of all entities that take part to service provision and their relationships have to be described. The scope is to state responsibilities of each provider and to assure quality of service required from customer.A useful tool in formalizing the mentioned inter-relationships between entities is Service Level Agreement (SLA), that is the result of a negotiation between two or more parties with the objective of reaching a common understanding about service delivered, its quality, responsibilities, priorities, etc.This Recommendation describes a generic structure of SLA adopting an approach independent from the type of service and the technology used. That approach is useful especially in a multi-provider environment which today has become reality.