are common enough in IT, covering everything from email to voice services. Cellular services, however, are treated much differently. Because of the consumer-centric nature of wireless services, SLAs have not been seen as important.

With LTE capable of acting as a mission-critical network, these agreements must be comparable to those from other service providers. Running an enterprise IT backbone on a network sans SLA is essentially a pink-slip-in-waiting for any IT executive, so for widespread adoption in the business, SLAs must become commonplace.

That's not to say that the SLA needs to be free. Businesses are willing to pay for benefits above and beyond the consumer world. For example, a three-second download speed enhancement might seem trivial to consumers. But for the enterprise, this efficiency spread across a network could represent significant productivity gains, hence their willingness to pay more for it.