What's a realistic AV uptime SLA?

A realistic AV uptime SLA is 99.9% per room per year, which is roughly 9 hours of acceptable downtime annually. That's achievable on a well-monitored estate with planned maintenance and remote alerting. 99.99% (about 52 minutes/year) requires hardware redundancy and is genuinely overkill for meeting room AV; it's a target for broadcast control rooms and trading desk audio, not boardrooms.

Be sceptical of any AV integrator quoting uptime percentages without qualification. Most AV failures are caused by factors outside the integrator's direct control: a Microsoft 365 service outage takes Teams Rooms offline globally; a corporate VLAN change kills MTR authentication; an OEM firmware bug from Logitech, Poly or Crestron affects every room running that version; a network switch reboot drops every Q-SYS endpoint on the segment. An honest integrator can guarantee response time, planned-visit cadence and root-cause analysis. Uptime % can only be guaranteed if they also own the network, the M365 tenant and the OEM firmware, which they don't.

Here's what realistic SLA tiers look like in practice for a UK B2B estate:

The right framing is to specify what you want measured and reported: mean time to acknowledge (MTTA), mean time to resolve (MTTR), number of incidents resolved remotely vs on-site, and percentage of planned visits completed. Those are the numbers that tell you whether the support is working. See Strive AV's support service for the standard contract structure.

Quick reference: 99.9% per room per year (~9 hours acceptable downtime) is realistic; 99.99% requires redundancy and is overkill for meeting rooms. Specify response time and incident metrics in the SLA, not uptime %.