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Internet Partitioning - Cogent vs Level 3?
slashmicah asks: "Internet partitioning and Tier 1 ISPs are something most people don't know much about (myself included). Today, however, some Slashdot readers might have run into some issues involving these two topics. Cogent Communications and Level 3, both Tier 1 ISPs, are apparently having some 'undisclosed' disagreements, causing an Internet partition by turning-off or deactivating their peering point. Cogent Co. has released a statement explaining their side of the problem, however they have no mention of when the problem will be fixed, or when they will sort it out. This partitioning is a problem because any [single-homed] computers that are connected through Cogent Co, can not connect to [single-homed] computers connected through Level 3. Having spent all day sorting out this problem, I ask Slashdot: Isn't there a better way that the issue of peering can be handled/regulated? If not, does the future hold a scenario in which the Internet is split into several separate networks, only to be connected at the whims of large corporations?"
While it is always fun to entertain such doomsday scenarios in ones' mind, I don't think that anything like this is possible. Current demands of most large corporations (Microsoft, Apple, any number of others) along with the internet-using public are for a universally-connected internet. Any company that simply creates its own network is going to face a huge revenue loss.
Why can't we all (Cogent and Level 3 included) just get along?
Level3 is threatened by Cogent's bandwidth pricing model, and is using it's weight to threaten that model, forcing Cogent to buy transit if it wants to reach its network. THat's how things work: you can't get free bandwidth from everyone, you're going to have to be willing to step up and pay for your link.
Video Phone Blogs send video messages straight to the web.
If they don't sort it out, find a new ISP.
If not, does the future hold a scenario in which the Internet is split into several separate networks, only to be connected at the whims of large corporations?
A quote about censorship. Come on, we all know it. The internet will see that as damage and route around it. The very fact that you mention that this affects single homed computers on one or the other network means that even at the onset of this "partitioning" it is ineffective.
I tried to get First Post but I was using Level3
The customers on each one of the company's networks needs to call them and demand resolution. This is the fastest and most effective method of getting the company to pay attention and fix the problem. If the customers open trouble tickets on this issue it will get resolved. - Dan
..but I notice I am unable to access Drudge today, first time I remember his site being down.
For an example of this visit https://www.linx.net/www_public/our_members/peerin g_matrix/
that shows the peering matrix at the London Internet Exchange.
At least it's not like UUNET more than one, some years ago, wanting to charge other Tier 1's per packet for transfer when peering while their traffic they wanted to pass for free. They were a big dog and were trying to make everyone pay. No one did and threatened to or did kill off traffic until UUNET got the sh*t together. But the did try to pull it off more than once.
I regret the lack of attribution on my above quote - it's from Geoff Huston, with full document available here
Video Phone Blogs send video messages straight to the web.
For something as essential to the nation as internet service, maybe it's time to consider implementing regulations similar to what electric, water, gas, and telecommunication companies have.
If my grandma can't check her email for a day, I don't really care that much. If my doctor is consulting with a cardiac specialist over using VoIP (V being either voice or video) concerning an acute health problem then I have a much larger problem with outages. As long as we have important economic or healthcare services running over the internet--which is the foreseeable future--this sort of thing needs to either be avoided or have a pre-planned workaround.
I guess this explains some of the unresponsive hosts I came across today. And here I was thinking it must be Bob's Worm of the Week.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
Luckily, both my web host and a few sites I frequent that are connected by cogent. I just love having to use a proxy to get to them. Just Wonderful!
I don't think anyone likes level 3, my company is discontinueing contract with them because of their laxidasical response to routeing issues in their network
It's possibly on a par with the scenario of countries cutting others off their internet connections. Not that it can't be done, but the repercussions are akin to MAD. Although these days with the effective merger of state and corporate interests anything can happen...
insecurity asks the wrong question irritation gives the wrong answer
We all know that's not going to happen in any immediate future. As far as Level3 and Cogent is concerned, they both suck anyway. I guess, that's when Tier 2/3 providers with multi peering come up with best solution for customers worrying about Tier 1 peering parters acting like 5 year olds on a playground.
"Don't let fools fool you. They are the clever ones."
If large companies connect to multiple Tier 1s, then they pretty much don't have to care; their customers can still reach them.
Personally, there are several sites I can't get to from home now. I didn't have any problem getting them from work (UT Austin). I have effectively zero power to rectify this. Annoying.
Now, if Cogent offered me some way to connect to them for an additional $5/mo... would I?
Think... if the government allowed an additional $5/mo. for each Tier 1 my ISP (Time Warner) is connected to... my cable modem bill would instantly double.
That's a scenario that bothers me more than the dissolution of the Net does. Flip side, the Internet would get a whole lot more redundant really quick...
As long as they make a backup copy, I'm fine with it.
we got an email this afternoon from our provider, who let us know that cogent will be reachable by their second link, which is WilTel. However, the link is slower than the Level3 link. There will also be more traffic being routed through less points, meaning congestion. (and obvious lack of redundancy, if the WilTel connection has problems, no Level3) We have had users complaining about sites being unreachable at random times this afternoon. One of our providers very big customers is the OSU Open Source Lab, home of Drupal, mozilla download servers, master.Kernel.org servers, and many, many others. If your having problems reaching these sites, that is probably why.
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
Everyone knows what a success MAE-East, MAE-West and the rest of the public peering points have been. Let's build a few more of them! Or, even better, encourage the federal government to get involved. Perhaps spending some of the federal budget on this problem would be a good idea. I think I recall a peering point clause in the constitution somewhere.
In all seriousness, these private companies will work it out when they realize that their paying customers are pissed and leaving because they're no longer selling very complete connectivity. Just like in the past, it won't take long. If TV has taught me anything, these problems are usually wrapped up pretty nicely in about 28 minutes.
Blame AOL and MS!
Peer Relaying should never depend on the goodwill of Tier 1 ISPs. The core backbone routing infrastructure should never have to deal with problems of ISPs. an ISP should never be a carrier, and a carrier should never be a ISP.
Robert
Ok first off, you need to learn how routing on the internet works. This does not mean that those two single homed computers will not be able to talk, they will just have to take a less direct route, with more hops.
Yeah I am just a network guy but I bet I know more about this than the "expert" "predicting" gas prices on CNN.
along with Drudge, all inaccessible through roadrunner...
Ironically, because of the depeering, I can't get to it!
Viper is the preferred editor of the Emacs operating system.
I have been kicking around the fringes of the high-speed data stuff for a number of years, and there's one true lesson to be learned;
Telcos suck.
ALL of them do in their own special way.
"Ping request could not find host www.cogentco.com. Please check the name and try again."
but, when I ping it from nwtools.com, it works just fine. I can connect to many other websites, but not to cogent. I am on a verizon DSL, if that makes any difference. Does anyone have any ideas as to what's going on?
Ok, I read the wikipedia information on Tier 1 and Peering, so I present the following scenario. What's to stop Cogent or Level 3 from peering with AT&T, who is also peering with the other guy, and having traffic bridged through AT&T? Doesn't a peer of your peer give you access to both peer's networks? I'm wondering this, because I don't think there is anyway all the Tier 1 providers would have disagreements with every other Tier 1 provider at the same time to keep everyone partitioned. In the long run, if you had enough disagreements with all but 1 other Tier 1 provider, then you could have a problem. Because you effectively (sort of) become a Tier 2 provider since all your traffic will need to route through the 1 peer you have, and I'm sure they'll catch on to that and charge you up the wazoo for it. Can anyone clarify this for me?
Lets assume Cogent and Level 3 split up one city (and I know they have done it to at least one place) amongst themselves. Someone happens to be using voip to call 911 while on Level 3, while Cogent is maintaining the 911 system's voip call receiver, preventing the voip 911 call from ever reaching it...
wow they could both be sued for huge sums of money...
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
Cogent's statement:
Cogent Network Status/DNS Server Status Description:
Date: 10/05/2005
Level 3 has partitioned its part of the Internet from Cogent's part of the Internet by denying Level 3's
customers access to Cogent's customers and denying Cogent's customers access to Level 3 customers. Level 3
terminated its peering with Cogent without cause (as permitted under its peering agreement with Cogent)
even though both Cogent and Level 3 remained in full compliance with the previously existing interconnection
agreement.
Many Level 3 customers can still exchange traffic with Cogent customers because the Level 3 customer is multi-
homed, i.e. it also has a connection to Cogent or to one of the many other networks with which Cogent has a
peering relationship. As described below Cogent is offering a solution to Level 3 customers that are not multi-homed.
Cogent will offer any Level 3 customer, who is single homed to the Level 3 network as of October 5, 2005,
one year of full Internet transit free of charge at the same bandwidth currently being supplied by Level 3.
Cogent will provide this connectivity in over 1,000 locations throughout North America and Europe.
Cogent is committed to an open Internet. The existing interconnection facilities between Level 3 and Cogent
remain intact. Cogent hopes that Level 3 will reactivate these connections, restoring a full level of service
to their customers.
For more information on Cogent's offer of free Internet transit, please call:
NORTH AMERICA: 1-877-875-4432
EUROPE: +33 (0)1 49 03 19 30
It's not like the Googlenet wouldn't save us.
SPF support for most open source mail servers can be found at libspf2.
So...you predict that things will change?
Man! Quit your day job and start your own business as a Prophet!
Go! The world needs someone of your great talents too much for you to be slaving away in front of a computer!
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
This is someone's case report of network outages. How is this "Status:1, Offtopic"!?!
"Recently, certain peers have been disconnected from their direct connection to the Level 3 IP network. Some disconnected peers may elect to block access to certain IP addresses as a result of the disconnection. If a peer elects not to restore connectivity to the Level 3 network through alternative means, customers seeking continued access to the Level 3 network should make alternate arrangements."
They're saying Cogent is intentionally not advertising routes to them via other providers, presumably because they're upset about not having a peering agreement in place. Anyone affected by this presumably needs to harass Cogent.
http://ws.arin.net/whois?queryinput=AS174
From Cogent's side, as linked in the summary:
"Cogent will offer any Level 3 customer, who is single homed to the Level 3 network as of October 5, 2005,
one year of full Internet transit free of charge at the same bandwidth currently being supplied by Level 3.
Cogent will provide this connectivity in over 1,000 locations throughout North America and Europe."
Not that I really know what that means, or whether their claim that Level3 cut things off really makes Level3 the bad guys. Anyone want to explain for those of us that don't get it?
INANE (I'm Not A Network Engineer) but, as I understand it, peering has been a problem for awhile. Even if network providers do peer, as a customer your quality of service suffers. If your packets are sloughed off to some other provider's network and then there are problems downstream, for example, that provider has little incentive to help you since you're not one of their paying customers. Or something like that.
In any event, that's why companies like InterNAP offer multi-homed services.
Reminds me on an incident that happened in Australia a couple of years back. Telstra and Optus were pretty much owned all the links outside of Australia, but Telstra lost their major one in a shipping incident. (Sharp anchors?) With nowhere for their data to go they rerouted everything through Optus to let them handle it.
Optus didn't appreciate that and promptly blocked all data between themselves and Telstra. Customers with Telstra were pretty much screwed because they couldn't contact anything and with their network going nuts even sites within Telstra sucked a lot. Still, for a couple of days there, it was two halves of an internet available in here. Was amusing to watch really.
There's an easy technical fix to this problem: Start a nuclear war at the location of this peering point. Then by design the Internet will route around that area, and communications will be reestablished.
First, I think that Level-3 is within it's legal rights in terms of dealing with Cogent, but is probably in trouble with it's customers. I am a customer of Level-3 and of Cogent (in the same facility). When I buy IP transit from Level-3, I am not buying "part of the internet". This peering issue places 45+ Million IP addresses out of reach of the Level-3 network (and vice versa). Level-3 did not notify me that they were making this type of change. There is nothing on Level-3's website that even implies that everything is not hunky dory. If you buy a Level-3 line today, will they disclose to you that you are not connecting to the entire internet. I know I am being a little niave here, but not disclosing such a large change of policy is unconscionable.
Second, it is dishonest for Level-3 to blame Cogent for this exclusively. Level-3 had a peering arrangement with Cogent for a long time. If you look at Level-3's interconnection policy page:
http://www.level3.com/1511.html
It still looks like Cogent and Level-3 could peer under these terms. It was Level-3 that pulled the plug, not Cogent.
What is really annoying is that this is only traffic from Level-3 to Cogent, not to other parts of the internet. Level-3 wants money for Cogent customers to connect to Level-3's network but does not understand that this is a two-way connection and that Cogent's customers and Level-3's customer both benefit from this equally.
Up until this point, I was very happy with Level-3. They run an excellent network and I pay top-dollar to be on it. This blatent disregard for the impact on their customers is a diservice to their customers, to their reputation, and only begs for regulation.
It's not like the Internet is the key to everything, or to anything, really. It's certainly not the ne plus ultra of human achievement, or the One True Path to the Future.
Ya, the internet is wholly insignificant, why it's barely any more important than the telecommunications infrastructure for phones was in the 70's.
According to Wikipeida's list of tier one providers, linked to from the main wikipedia link, Cogent is not listed as a tier one provider.
Student Research and Development
The internet has no government, no constitution, no laws, no rights, no police, no courts. Don't talk about fairness or innocence, and don't talk about what should be done. Instead, talk about what is being done and what will be done by the amorphous unreachable undefinable blob called "the internet user base." -Paul Vixie
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
"I ask Slashdot: Isn't there a better way that the issue of peering can be handled/regulated? If not, does the future hold a scenario in which the Internet is split into several separate networks, only to be connected at the whims of large corporations?" Why yes, there is. It's called making sure your host is multihomed ;)
Peering is when you agree to send traffic destined to network X directly to network X via a direct connection between you and X. If you're using X's network to send traffic to Y, that's transit, and X will naturally expect you to pay for the privilege.
Everybody's a libertarian 'till their neighbour's becomes a crack house.
Translation: Cogent will let any Level 3 customer who is cut off use their service for one year at no charge.
This will eliminate any internet performance anomalies for those customers so that they are not affected in a bad way by this issue. It's also a good PR move that might let them grab a few Level 3 customers who are impressed by the goodwill gesture.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
I have reviewed all information available at this time, including discussion threads on many sites more specialised than Slashdot. This is bad. Very bad. Right now, there are millions of Internet users with partial connectivity.
But the action of Level3 is not merely an inconvenience to end users; it is hurting a great many small businesses, badly. There are thousands of small businesses that depend on single-homed Internet connectivity and that cannot afford dual-homing. There are dozens of low-cost datacenters that provide single-homed bandwith to tens of thousands of servers.
As we speak, the livelyhoods of thousands of entrepreneurs are being threatened. Many people depend on being able to offer internet services to any peer on the net. But today, Level3 has changed the rules of the game, and have split the Internet into two somewhat isolated internets.
This is happening on a very large scale. Sure, most of the affected people and businesses are going to get through it just fine. But given the sheer scale of the Internet, a small percentage of those depending on full connectivity will not escape this ordeal unscathed.
You can be sure that a few small businesses will close because of this, the reputations of a few persons will be damaged, and there will be a few bankruptcies - all because of Level3's evil actions. You won't hear about it in the media - nobody cares about such small-scale damage. But the damage is already done, and it is getting worse with every passing hour.
I urge you to join me in a five-minute hate against Level3 and all that their evil discriminative ways stand for. While Cogent is widely recognized for its shitty cut-rate network, they are the good guys here. In the past few years, Cogent has been a major driving force for lowering bandwith costs. Level3 is fighting back, and they long for the days where they charged 5000$/mbps. I say: down with Level3 !
Level 3 has a 1.5 billion market cap whereas Cogent is already at 2.1 billion
Get rid of everything Micro and Soft: Buy Viagra and/or Linux
Cogent just sucks, they have had several problems with their peering points, not just Level3, and it all stems from lack of equal traffic. The idea of a peering point is that you share your network for in transit traffic to other networks on the other side of your network. Cogent has always had a high level of incoming, but not in transit traffic. For instance say to get from my IP to another host would be 6 hops if I would pass via Cogent and 12 hops any other way. A proper peer would allow me to take the 6 hop route, but Cogent does not do this in a fair share. They make peers and abuse them in order to maintain the cheap prices, their poor business model is just catching up with them.
Why do you think some hosting providers specifically so NON-Cogent bandwidth? Perhaps cause they suck really..
The short version goes something like this:
.. well .. you get what happened today (I'm making an educated guess here based on what I know of the two carriers involved). A decides that spending 30 grand a month for what is a very lopsided bandwidth agreement is no longer economically feasible or reasonable. They go to B and say 'look, we're not doing this anymore, we're basically paying a hell of a lot of money every month for you to send a ton of traffic to us, and we don't send much of anything to you. You can either pay for all (or some larger portion of) the circuits, pony up some $$ per megabit, or we'll just cut it off at the stub and be done.'
Provider A and Provider B peer, be it public or private, normally they do this in several places and alternate who pays for the circuit, etc. Now, under normal circumstances, they both push enough traffic from one to the other to justify this mutual payment plan. However, in some cases, you find that B is either intentionally dumping traffic into A thinking A won't notice, or A discovers that its sending so little traffic to B in comparison to the amount B is sending to A that its not worth the continued cost.
When the first sort of thing happens, it usually gets resolved -REALLY- quick, that sort of behavior is not tolerated and will result in B getting de-peered by A (and potentially others once the abusive behavior is discovered and known) exceptionally quick unless B can show that it wasn't done knowingly or intentionally.
When the second instance happens
Based on Cogent's 'oh poor us' post from this morning, I'm leaning towards them having given L3 the finger when L3 said 'look, this isn't equitable, we're going to have to re-arrange the money'.
YMMV of course, but I'm betting I'm not terribly far off.
I wish I could edit that a bit. Me saying "cut off"... is a bit strong. The packets would still get from point A to point B. Without Cogent offering to link these people up, their packets would have to work around the blocked pipe by also passing through point C, point D, and point E.
--endless
The internet is made up by many layers of ISPs. Individual users connect to a user-level ISP, which must then connect to other ISPs to gain access to the rest of the net. The biggest ISPs tend to trade bandwidth between themselves without any payments in terms of money, while they charge lesser ISPs to connect to their networks.
In this case I think it's a fair guess that Level 3, which used to let Cogent connect for free, has decided that they are enough smaller (Cogent is about half Level3's size, controlling a 'mere' 23+ million IPs), that they ought to be paying to use their network. Cogent probably refused to pay, at which point Level3 cut them off as a negotiating tactic.
Now people on ISPs who connect to the rest of the internet through cogent, and only cogent, can't connect to anything that connects to the net through Level3 and only Level3.
Any reputable ISP ought to connect to many others, not just a single large provider, and thus see at worst a noticeable slowdown in some sites due to this depeering. But there are always some people who go the cheap and easy way, set themselves up with a single point of failure, and get bit in the ass by events like this.
This link http://status.cogentco.com/ isn't very helpful to those of us who are being affected. We can't see it.
Anyone have a link that will work for those of us who can't access it?
You can call:
720-888-2518 (Level3 Investor Relations)
and complain.
Or call 877-453-8353 (Main customer service number).
Anyone want to explain for those of us that don't get it?
What they are essentially saying is: "We haven't done anything. We haven't made any changes on our side" Level 3 have terminated their connection to Cogent "Without cause". Now, that's probably legal speak on Cogent's side for we haven't got the letter in triplicate yet telling us what the reason is. Or otherwise whoever put up the notification about it doesn't know.
Now, Cogent may have tried to change the peering arrangement, or Level 3 may have too, one side probably didn't agree, or otherwise an agreement ran out and the switch got flipped. This has happened previously with Cogent in their peering arrangement with AOL.
What Cogent are trying to do is get business from Level 3 customers because Level 3 stopped the connection. Cogent is offering them connections to the Cogent network (And subsequently Cogent's customers) for a year with no fee on the amount of data they put through. That connection itself they will obviously have to pay for, but the customer can connect into (presumably) the closest of any of 1000 points across North America and Europe.
Now some people are already connected to both Cogent and Level 3. These people won't have any problems as they will be able to go direct into either ISP. These people would probably have never have used the interconnect between Cogent and Level 3 either, unless one of their connections into either Cogent or Level 3 went down.
I understand this is still rather technical, for a simpler version, take a look through the document that I linked to.
Curiosity was framed; ignorance killed the cat. -- Author unknown
is the fact that Roadrunner is blocking all Alex Jones websites, now. Prisonplanet.com, etc.
We should partition the Internet with FAT. A 2GB limit should suffice, right?
"Hey, where did Slashdot go?"
"Oh, that's at F:/http://www.slashdot.org now."
the cogent letter says that level3 terminated the connection without notice with neither companies breaching the existing link agreement ....
Level3's Motto (on the top of their website) is "The Network Partner You Can Rely On" ...
gotta love the hate ;)
- You're not paranoid, they really are after you.
My first email adress was "p057@nemomus" What's that? Doesn't look like you could resolve that address? Well, from that new-fangled "internet" you could type in "p057@nemomus.bitnet" and it would come through just fine.
Can someone explain something about this? If Cogent is cutoff from Level III, certainly they are not single homed into Level III.
Shouldn't a packet destined for Level III from Cogent go to another provider (i.e. PacBell, Time Warner or some other provider), and then be forwarded to Level III from there?
I wonder what google is doing with all that dark fiber...
I can't believe I'm hearing a call for more regulation, even U.N. control. The lack of rational thought and disregard of unintended consequences amazes me.
The Internet has flourished without much control, run by Both large and small businesses for one reason: profit. Information is free yet its distribution is profitable.
If we give government control (taxation, censorship and worse(, we'll see less freedom.
Why did this jinx happen? Because the top tier providers aren't making a profit. But their calls for support go unheard, so they found a way to make it news.
When businesses that rely on the infrastructure paid for by private industries, they have high expectations. But they're not paying for that infrastructure!
Trust me, no one wants to bifurcate the Internet. Its a ploy to show a problem that needs to be solved. You will Never see it done for control, censorship or monopoly powers. You'll only see it when consumers don't pay for what they use. See California's old electric company that was forced to sell energy at a loss. They went bankrupt.
We once had to backhaul a huge number of routes because of a peering issue between PSInet and @home I think. Fiber had been pulled all the way to the mark outside the building. All PSI had to do was literally connect up the line. It turned into a pissing match between the two CEO's and just sat rotting for MONTHS.
I remember back when NO ONE would peer with Quest because they were all datacenters and not dialup, so they had no advertising value. So no one would peer, not even if Quest paid. (depending on who bennifits most, the determines things like who pays how much etc). So Quest went around buying up little backwater mom&pop ISPs only for the peering. If they wanted a peering point with a certain net in a certain area, just find who has one, and buy them out. It was funny.
You can call: 720-888-2518 (Level3 Investor Relations) and complain.
Or call 877-453-8353 (Main customer service number).
people without UUnet would get one or pressure their provider to use the UUnet uplink
"Dammit Time Warner! Get a UUnet uplink or I'll... I'll... I'll switch to the other cable company!"
Yeah, I see this going over real well for the home users. The game's over, from today the internet is now a corporate-only pool, we little kids are just here until they blow the whistle for adult swim.
ISPs want common carrier status when the RIAA sues them, but they don't want it when it means they must carry traffic from all other networks.
These guys suck. May capitalistic pressure force them out of business.
-ted
But that's exactly what the Internet is (well, sometime's they're connected at the whim of educational institutions, but the whole point of the internet is that it's a network of networks).
Apparently, someone should inform Alex Jones that this problem is not the Illuminati finally coming after him.
I have a server that is only connected (on outbound traffic) to Cogent and I can't even go to Level 3's home page.
Screw Level3, they will never get any of my business. BTW Level 3 is not alone, AT&T has played games with Cogent in terms of trying to get them to pay, but they never pulled the plug, they just wouldn't upgrade the over saturated peering links.
Informative and Insightful... too many other posters without a clue.
Folks on the NANOG list are discussing this rather vigorously at the moment. You can follow the thread here: http://www.merit.edu/mail.archives/nanog/2005-10/
Sorry, but with modern BGP routes if there is no way through a Level 1 peering point then the data is unlikely to get through except for if your upstream is multihomed with each of the parties that severed their peering point(s). There really isn't as much redundancy of routes as many people think, that mostly went out after MAE stopped being a common peering point for all the carriers and private peering points took over most of the inter carrier traffic.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Wow, piggybacking a sales pitch on an outage notification; that's classy.
Level 3 is not advertising the Cogent route at all.
I'd bet L3's argument is that they will not provide transit across their AS to Cogent. It's a play that's been made several times before. The first time I know of it being done was in 1995 when Sean Doran pulled this at the CIX-W router, preferring to take commercial traffic via NSFNET or Sprint reseller service. Not only didn't it work, but it caused some immediate political backlash as Sean's action (presumably made without his boss's approval, who was the chairman of the CIX board and took some political grief for Sean's latest stunt) caused several state's to literally drop off the map.
If my memory's right, I think this got pulled again around 1998 timeframe on Exodus by someone like Genuity (I may be wrong about the culprit), only for the higher ups at the culprit to discover they couldn't see half of the world's worthwhile websites and search engines. Much of this was in the transit battle - e.g. if you had consumers, you felt your eyeballs were the value of the Internet and all other ISPs should pay you to get to your consumers, while if you were a content provider, you had the stuff all those consumers were paying their ISP to get to and someone had better pay you for that content.
What can you do about it? Let your ISP know you're not paying them for 80% of the Internet. When UUNET considered pulling this stunt around 1997, I worked for a small software shop that had a couple bonded UUNET T1's and we let them know we were going to drop them the moment they were only selling partial Internet. Then follow through if they do (UUNET backed off). Bilateral agreements are weird things in the world of settlement-free IP exchange, so unless you want a settlement-driven Internet (which will have unusual effects you might not want, like driving a per-packet pricing model), just expect this occasionally and drop those who don't play well with others. When L3 drops customer base, even the Denver boys will figure out their customers aren't happy.
*scoove*
As an eBGP transit engineer for an undisclosed tier1 transit ISP (neither of those mentioned in the article), allow me to calm down those of you that are excitable and correct those of you who are predicting future doomsday scenarios. This is simply an anomaly occurance in a world of less-than-formal business partnerships that comprise the internet (AKA, 'a connection of peering agreements between transit isp's and their customers). Peering agreements have long been fairly informal so long as the traffic engineers for each entity can verify that the bi-directional flow is mostly equal in either direction; as to avoid providing welfare services to another network without a mutually beneficial amount of reciprocation (traffic flowing the OTHER way). As traffic-engineering expands beyond what used to be comprised mostly of MRTG and NetFlow with a higher-level granularity; where disputes only usually consisted of whether various broadcast types, headers and other types of overhead should be included in the netflows. NOW, there are packages so granular being put into place on each peering point, the reports being generated now are much more pomp and circumstance of the administrative type, that since they are on a much more high level of zoom; what USED to be a normal directional fluctuation of 1% for a few days now shows up on a fresh-face VP's desk in the form of "WE ARE PROVIDING HUGELY DISPARATE ADVANTAGES TO OUR PEER AT THIS POINT" and these VP's start shit without getting the proper context from the traffic engineers. I'm not saying this is the CAUSE for this instance, but this is why disagreements have taken an upward swing. The problem is now gaining vision since these trigger-happy execs are being put back into context by the engineers, and everything will even out. This particular instance in the news just happens to be an ANOMALY, and IS NOT A HARBINGER OF THINGS TO COME. so STOP the doomsday crap unless you have inside information; otherwise your claims are baseless and alarming. There is TOO MUCH INVESTED now in the internet as a transit for business operations that corporate america will NEVER, EVER allow a segmentation of the net even in the worst case scenarios, which is NOT what this is. It's a one-off, so just chill. Even if Cogent NEVER peers with L3 anywhere ever again, there WILL be alternate paths and capacity buildouts to take up the slack created by these two organizations acting like b****es.
FURTHER, the author is not entirely correct in saying that single-homed computers downstream of cogent cannot talk to single-homed computers downstream of L3. While it's true the AS_PATH such that the traffic cannot currently cross directly from cogent to L3, it's NOT true that single-homed cogent customers cannot talk to single-homed L3 customers. FALSE. There are almost definetely SEVERAL other [AS_]paths to practically ANY network downstream of cogent OR L3. The lowest-cost path may be currently inoperable, and may forever be inoperable, but another AS_PATH will take it's place, and the capacity shift WILL be dealt with by the infrastructure engineers at whichever isp(s) have assumed the next best path. The author ought to correct this as his premise violates the very technique by which the internet offers redundancy.... alternate paths in the case of severed links.
Chill peeps
G's up Backhoes down
hmm, I have Wide Open West, could have had Adelphia but they offered crappier service for a few dollars more per month. I'm sorry that you live somewhere where the local municipality wasn't enlightened enough during the eighties to demand choice. Besides unless you are out in the boonies you probably have DSL available with your choice of providers thanks to Covad and your local telco. Heck I AM in the boonies (my neighbors are a farm, a farm, a ranch, and a utility right of way) and I can get decent speed DSL in addition to the two cable offerings.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I worked there and its a deathmarch shop for IT and network people; they treat their peopel like crap, and leaving there was the best thing I ever did.
The arrogance of Jim Crowe [workign on his 7th manion and 8th large layoff at Level 3] and Kevin O'Hara (President, CEO) is only matched by the jailbird Bernie Ebbers. They only reason they have yet to decalre bankruptcy and liquidate thier debt (and clear away their bad business model with a fresh debt-free start) is that all their Omaha cronies have tied up money in the company stock, which would be flushed.
That they would resort to stunts like this against companies that undermine their pricing is not surprising. Level 3 have amassed BILLIONS in debt that they cannot service at current pricing levels, while Cogent and other more nimble competitors can sustain operations and drain Level3 into bankruptcy. So Level 3 execs do what arrogant desperate people do: lash out.
Level 3 is playing the "Sampson" card - if they cant make people price it their way, they will take the internet down with them.
And they did this trying to kill XO and now Cogent. Watch for more until they finally admit their business model is a failed one, and they declare bankruptcy, wipe the debt, and then begin to price lower and rake in the profits that their debt service is now eating.
Dude, like all engineering solutions, it works this way:
Reliable, cheap, or high quality: pick two.
The Internet is renowned for providing cheap and high-quality (read: high bandwidth) communications. If you want it to prioritize reliability, you're going to have to give up one of the other two qualities.
Count me out. If I want reliable communication, I'll pick up the phone or radio. And it will cost me a hell of a lot more per megabyte than videoconferencing over the 'net, ayup. But it will get through.
As for "regulation" (by the government, I'm assuming) ensuring a much higher reliability of the 'ne...er...catch any of the news coverage of Hurricane Katrina, did you?
So this is why I have yet to be able to get to Penny Arcade or Megatokyo today? I can get to Level3's website, but not Cogent.
That either network corporation allowed this to occur is without pardon.
What I'm afraid of, is when this is all over and people realize how singificant it was, the solution to mangers will be "buy service to each, so we never have to worry about being partioned". Which is exactly what both companies would like to see.
-Malakai
A Dragon Lives in my Garage
Cogent is fucking garbage, IMHO. They absolutely blow.
It's more complicated that you make it out to be. Even if you connect to a large ISP (like NYC Time Warned Road Runner) you are shit out of luck right now. Not because they don't have a way of routing around the break, but beacuse they aren't prepared to implement such a drastic change. It's not all automatically controlled like people think. Most companies, like Time Warner RR would need to modify and reload hundreds of routers to effectively use some other connection point to get around the current 'block'.
And it's been about 8 hours and they still haven't.
At this stage, you'd be better off with a smaller ISP, because they have fewer connection points to update with the new routing table rows.
-Malakai
A Dragon Lives in my Garage
Wouldn't it be great to form a company that, amid chaos preventing peering agreements, purchases bandwidth from backbone participants and resells that bandwidth to other participants and smaller-tier ISPs? Better yet, the company wouldn't need to actually create any bandwidth, or for that matter, provide any hardware at peering points - it could just use existing hardware owned by other companies. And even better, find ways to exploit the system so that money is made by doing nothing at all even though the books indicate that network conditions are being improved.
Just make sure to have my charter flight ready to leave for sunnier climes without extradition agreements, just in case.
Perhaps you didn't understand the parent. He understands that that is the state of the Internet NOW. He is saying that as the repercussions of problems become more serious, it will no longer be acceptable.
Pick any one of the number of infrastructures upon which this nation depends--your little rant was true for each of them at some point in history. But every infrastructure has to grow up sometime. If it doesn't do it itself, the government is only too happy to appease the nation by creating a "helping hand." (regulatory agency)
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Maybe they got tired of each others' spam-support!
Cogent seems to have a problem policing it's network. That traffic keeps hitting L3 and they are tired of it. That's overly simplified, but yeah, cogent is not the best for policing it's network...I would have a hard time peering with them.
Now, since there is apparently some lack of understand of what peering is by the author of the article.... Peering is when 2 companies run a line between themselves. They aren't selling bandwidth to each other, but they share the line cost and traffic between them only goes between them. It helps speed up routes and in many cases helps avoid bottle necks at some of the central hubs.
While I rather enjoyed your screed against level-3 and cogent, did you have an actual question in this "ask slashvertisement?"
Anyone know a cheap and easy way to multi-home a web server on a DSL and a Cable line? (without asking the cable or phone co to set up something)
The keywords being cheap and not having to ask the telcos.
With SBC's acquisition of AT&T's network almost under their belt, You need only wait for SBC to take over the world, then there will only be one Tier 1 ISP and there will be no peering relationship issues!
Internet Health Report
First one who can post output from traceroute before and after the partition gets a free '5, Informative'!
This sig rocks the casbah.
I can't believe nobody has yet bothered to explain the difference between transit and nontransit service.
When you buy Internet bandwidth from your ISP, you are getting transit service. This means that you can use the link to send traffic to that ISP and to other ISP's upstream from it.
Nontransit service means that the link is to be used exclusively for sending traffic to that one ISP.
All of the Tier 1 ISP's provide nontransit service to each other, because at tier 1 there is no such thing as "upstream." This is not people playing stupid, this is how it's done at the top. It's the reason why the major peering points exist.
Any ISP who wants to shut off a peering arrangement for stupid business-o-political purposes is creating a hole in its own connectivity, and therefore shooting itself in the foot, plain and simple.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Bugger, not only can't I browse sites on level3 anymore I can't amuse myself in downtime because for some misterious reason incoming spam has slowed too :-P
level3.blackholes.us
Presumably, if your "business" (so... IRC server) is connected only to Cogent, you aren't likely to be in the market for services from Level 3 in the near future anyway.
I think they'll sleep OK.
As I'm on the Level 3 side, I cannot get to the cogent site to SEE the status report.
= Grow a brain...
Dude it's just like, a really BIG subnet... you know, like China.
The first complete, rational explanation in the entire thread.
Important production servers need dual homed, highly reliable connectivity. Public facing servers are a commodity. The commonality of blade servers and big data center technology are escallating this.
Case in point: I've run my own data center for 12 years (18 if you could dial up bbs crap). This week, I'm shutting it down. I need more reliability for an important application, and it will be cheaper for me to outsource the public facing side to a data center (In my case, linux boxes at ServerBeach -- I can plug them, they've made me happy).
This is coming from someone with 13 years running his own shop; who owns good firewall, routing, and standby power equipment; as well as servers. Still, it will be cheaper from month 1 to outsource today. For less money, I don't have to buy (or maintain) hardware, get more bandwidth, multi-homed servers, way more reliable power and facilities, and a lower power bill.
The market is changing. More and more consumer broadband utilities (which is what they are) will have to drop out of the single homed dedidcated circuit market. Dissagree? Time Warner doesn't. Why do you think they're building state of the art colocation facilities and datacenters in the markets they serve?
Because soon public facing servers for any serious purpose will live primarily in big datacenters. The only companies to host their own, will be hosting them in their own big corporate data centers.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
It depends on how things are setup. It depends on whether or not Level 3 stopped advertising those routes or if they started blocking traffic. If they stopped advertising the routes, that traffic should go over a different AS path than it previously did. In my case, it is, as 'show ip bgp' confirms.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
When I asked for an explanation of this, it had to do with a corporate silent-treatment of sorts; because Paltel/Jawwal (the Palestinian telco) was suing Cellcom for licensing infringement and illegal operation, the Cellcom network decided to boycott the Palestinian phone carriers. This caused all sorts of problems for Palestinian society, and the effect was that everyone in Palestinian areas were ditching the local telco and getting Israeli Cellcom cell phones. Jawwal was facing dire times, after their offices were raided by Israeli military and tech imports were prevented because of blanket security concerns.
For folks on the ground, this was just one more manifestation of the intifada/occupation, even the corporations were going at it.
More background available here, here and here.
There = Their
Holmed = Homed
Generaly = Generally
Bonified = Bonafide
Still, the content appears informed. I guess good spelling doesn't mean everything, eh?
I work for Time Warner Cable and we use Level 3. I can't talk about the details of what's going on but the notes on the ticket opened for this issue and the conference call/bridge have covered alot. Alot of people in high up positions are working for find us a work around until a solution can be found. Level 3 is still routing traffic TO Cogent but they are not routing it back at this time. I was working on this issue all night. My suprise to come home and find it on Slashdot. I sure hope they can come to some kind of agreement soon (contract was terminated at 5:30am 10/5/05) but from what's been said thus far it's not looking like it's going to be a quick fix.
Maybe we should be filing abuse reports about Level3 at their abuse report form.
Personally, I wouldn't use either of them. There are many people that say they block one or both of them on their networks. A rare few even say they don't accept ANY packets on ANY port, not just port 25.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Soylent Green is peoplicious!
This is a really really big problem. Australia set up a commission to looking into some of these problems a couple years ago.
What the issue is follows. The Telecomunications business has been built on the idea of big fish being able to control little fish. The concept of who does a service for whom does not seem to exist.
This means that large telecos (who often are an ISP as well) can force smaller players to pay them. Thus a small ISP will find that if one of their customers sends off an email to a friend connected to the large ISP - then the small ISP has to pay the large ISP for the connection and the transfer of the email. On the other hand - if the large ISP's customer replies to the email - then the small ISP still has to pay.
In the case of large Telecom giants like Telstra in Australia and Telus in Canada, both have connections to high speed networks in the USA. They do this because they need access to internet content. The pay a fee for this access and it is a heafty fee. Smaller ISP's pay access charges to Telus and Telstra. So the fish in the middle charges the smaller fish but has to pay the larger fish. Most of this content is probably web content.
Suppose we have a small web hosting service. If that service is locted in say Australia then Telstra will charge access at the point the content hits the Telstra network. It may have traveled through a couple ISPs before then and each will charge the smaller fish - which in this case is the web hosting service. The same will happen in Canada if the server is hosted in Canada.
If the customer resides in the country where the server is located - then the teleco eventually charges the end user as well.
However if that web hosting business is relocated into the USA - then both Telstra and Telus in this example will end up paying for access to the content they need to deliver to their customer.
This leaves both countries in the position that their telecommunications firms will pay foreigners for access to internet content while at the same time these companies steadfastly refuse to offer the same deal to the citizens of the countries that paid for and built these telecomunication systems they maintain.
From the standpoint of the web hosting company - it creates a very unfair playing feild. Money usually travels in the opposite direction as a service for instance. If you take you girlfriend to see a movie - you guys pay the theater - the theater pays the film distributor and eventually the movie house and actors also get paid.
If the movie business were organised like the telecomunications business - then the movie distributor would expect the movie creator to pay them and hand over the movie at a cost - ie - the cost of distribution.
Under acts like the DMCA the telecommunications industry got the grandfathered right to distribute and cache other people's copy righted material with no compensation to the copy right holder. It is argued that the copy right holder (In this case the web masters) agree to this idea when they put material up on the net. The truth is that they were generally not a party to the negotiations that went into making up these laws. Now they are trapped in a system that they often don't understand. Often would be web content businesses just toss in the towel before they start.
I was personally involved in such a project and we just didn't even bother to try. In our case we were looking to stream flash based content and at that time most was via dial up. Our line costs for bandwidth would have wiped out many times over any revenue stream we could have created. In effect we would have been subsidizing the telco who at that time was bringing in high speed access. The content would have been of interest to them of course. If we could have served it via an Akami style system - maybe. But we said to hell with it and shut down the company.
What these unfair perring arrangments did was to create a powerful incentive for part of the content creatio
Fair enough. I won't confuse a single -- or even multiple -- recent incidents of government screwing up with a general incapability, so long as you don't confuse their occasional recent successes with a general capability.
There's nothing inherently wrong with enforcing minimum standards of service. I'm just pointing out it's inherently expensive, so if you want guaranteed service, you're going to have to pay for it, one way or another. You can pay yourself, directly to the ISP. Or you can pay the government every April 15, and then they'll take care of the ISP's cost to provide the service.
Where I see your argument as loopy is, first, that when you hire Uncle Sam as a middleman you always increase your own ultimate costs, because all those government employees working as a buffer between you and the ISP need their salaries and retirement benefits. Second, you lose a lot of flexibility. Your idea of a "reasonable" minimum level of service may not -- indeed probably does not -- match mine, or that of the guy down the block. In the free market, we can each hope to strike a deal we like with a provider who thinks as we do. We can each buy whatever minimum standard of service we individually find reasonable and for which we're willing to pay.
But with Uncle Sam doing the negotiating for everybody, all that goes away. It's a one-size-fits-all solution, crafted by a bunch of largely tech-ignorant lawyers in Congress. You really want to live with (and pay for) Congressman Windoze 95's idea of a universal "reasonable" minimum standard of service? Blech.
Note that I assume you weren't overcome by temporary insanity and hallucinating that you could get a nice new and higher minimum standard of service for free just by having Congress write a law that demands it. TANSTAAFL, you know.
Whoever is responsible for this needs to have their head partitioned from their fucking neck. A few messy examples might be called for right about now.
What you fail to realize in your jest, is it would work. The biggest problem between Cognent and L3 right now, is the Cognent is leaving old routes up that say they can still route to L3, when they can't. And they are actively filtering out alternative paths to L3 networks so their sub-tiers don't see the new routes. L3 is simple doing the active filter. Either way, very large multi-homed clients would have to hand-fix the routes and tie them to specific gateways.
If a nuke took out the original peer points, there's a chance software would fix the rest. (though, i'm not certain, the configs been written at this point. But if a nuke was the source of this problem, we'd mostly likely not have noticied the down time, only the large flash and radiation).
-Malakai
A Dragon Lives in my Garage
...it is dishonest for Level-3 to blame Cogent for this exclusively. Level-3 had a peering arrangement with Cogent for a long time. If you look at Level-3's interconnection policy page:
Seems to me they were pretty up-front about their terms for peering this from the start. I expect their peering contract with Cogent reflects this and allows either party to terminate the agreement at any time.http://www.level3.com/1511.html
It still looks like Cogent and Level-3 could peer under these terms. It was Level-3 that pulled the plug, not Cogent.
Quick quote from the introduction to these terms:
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
In the .hack series, the entire Internet gets taken down about late 2005 by a virus plus weak infrastructure. This is only the first step!
In a few years, we'll all be running systems off of Altimit OS with VR visors! And people will get sucked into video games....
Am I the only one thinking this?
lack of resiliency in BGP routes has nothing to do with "level 1" peering points, whatever those are. The vast bulk of private interconnections are richer, more geographically diverse, and generally better managed than the legacy MAE peering points. However, there hasn't been the sort of "peering of last resort" available since well before those days either: the CIX was the peering point of last resort, and eventually both Sprint and UUNet withdrew from it, fundamentally changing the Internet topology from a star to a partial mesh.
Read about it here - warning: it's a 120-page pdf...
-David
Need Geek Rock? Try The Franchise!
Level 3.. hahaha, I'm not suprised. They are not much of a professional outfit at all.. their service is goodam shite anyway, and I would guess it's because of erratic foot shooting practices like this. Nice to know this is why I've always had so many problems with them.
I highly doubt RR would have to change config and do a clear ip bgp * on "hundreds" of routers.
Their internal AS would handle updating a bulk of the work, I think in all honesty they would only have to change at most ~10 to get around this problem.
Curiosity was framed; ignorance killed the cat. -- Author unknown
I don't know if "thanking" Covad is really something anyone does. ;-)
(Sorry, a bit bitter about how they're handling our 2 DSL connections to our office. We're about to bail on them.)
he didn't say that it wasn't. He only said he'd like to prevent people from saying it was.
when I invent a device that allows me to stab people in the face over the Internet.
HAND.
Makes private wireless networks an obvious solution against splitting.
Please be clear on that fact that if L3 cuts their peering point with Cogent it does not stop anyone on either network from reaching the other as the article suggests. Peering simply gives each providers clients shortcuts to the others IP space. All tier one providers have multiple peering points because the whole point of routing a packet that is not destined for your network is to get that packet to the edge and off your network.
n /0,,sid7_gci212768,00.html
To try for some clarity, just as an example: L3 peers with Cogent, XO, and 4 other providers. Cogent peers with L3, Internap, and 6 other providers. So, if L3 turns off their peering to Cogent, packets that originate from Cogent that are destined for the L3 IP space will have to transit another common peer before they get to L3's network.
For an interesting look at how peering works in the real world take a look at http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com/sDefinitio
The problem is if you are a Level 3 customer you can no longer access Cogent's website to take advantage of the free offer!!!
You could switch to DSL, where you could get whatever provider you liked.
Or you could get a T1.
There are lots of ways not to be at the mercy of some large corporation. You'll just have to fork over the cash yourself instead of having the costs spread out over their whole customer pool.
Everybody is an equal on the internet... Corporation or end user alike. But that means everybody has to pay the same too.
Well, I use rochester.rr.com for my ISP and 24 hours since I started to see some wierdness and I'm still seeing it now.... some names don't resolve and some that do resolve can't find the route to host... and man was iTunes slow at downloading music lastnight... I didn't catch this article 'till this morning but I was resetting the modem and all sorts of crap to get things to work right... this explains a whole bunch... I can't even get to my blog at home from my machine at work.. oh the humanity!
Back to point, it seems that TWRR will change their routing tables without notice and the end user gets stuck trying to figure out why their connection is dead... their standard responce, turn off your modem for 10 seconds and turn back on... seems like their should be a more automated way for them to push routing information or whatever it is that needs to be reconfigured on the end modem.
How about a spell checker for slashdot, or even more impressive, a spell checker for strings in C-Code? Use lint! -DG
um, no.
BGP really *IS* automated, and you clearly have never worked for a large ISP. Disclaimer: I've worked for both of the two largest ISPs, and had backbone access at each, within the last five years. I am not currently employed by either of them.
If you're connected to an ISP who has connections to both Cogent and L3, you're fine. By definition, that includes any actual Tier 1 ISP (UUNet, AT&T, Qwest, etc)
If you're a customer of an ISP who is a customer of one of those particular Tier One providers, you're okay. Your packets will route to either L3 or Cogent as appropriate
The real problem is if you're either a customer of or a customer's customer of Cogent or L3 - at that point there's a disconnect. Both L3 and Cogent are significant wholesale dialup providers, so a lot of dial customers are affected.
-David
Need Geek Rock? Try The Franchise!
These are Tier 1 ISPs. You don't use them for your home internet connection. Nobody who would take up Cogent's offer is going to be running a web browser through a Level 3 connection. Tier 1 ISPs serve other ISPs and large businesses.
Even if they do not peer with each other, they will both peer with another Teir 1 in common, and even not, they will peer with other tier 1's, who in turn peer with someone in common of the other's peer.
Either way the traffic will still get to the other provider, even if the customer is single homed. It may not be the most efficent path but it will get there. That is the basics of the internet, and the reason BGP is around. I work on this stuff every day, I see peers drop, different peers come up.
It's called Dynamic routing for a reason.
In Virginia, Level 3 destroyed people's property without getting their permission. They keep trying to get the power of eminent domain to get land for free.
0 40481.pdfn -business.html
Here are some related links:
http://www.roanoke.com/news/roanoke/wb/xp-14617
http://www.courts.state.va.us/opinions/opnscvwp/1
http://swvalaw.blogspot.com/2004/11/are-we-back-i
Level 3 is just plain evil.
I sent a somewhat more business-like e-mail to their investor relations, but the gist was the same.
If the e-mails from angry clients don't get them to clean up their act, then perhaps a linking campaign will. I recommend links to an informative article on the matter be labelled "Level 3 broke the internet."
Won't this be solved once Google gets their free world wide wireless going?
I'd expect him to chose the $30 POTS line instead of the much more expensive and/or unreliable VoIP.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Cogents service sucks in general all over so you go level3.
Actually, Federal law now states that Telecoms are not required to share their lines with 3rd parties to help them compete with the cable co's.
Tuff world we live in. Watch all the 3rd parties drop like flys in the near future.
Your ignorance is infinitely greater than you realize.
I have a friend who works at a Microsoft contracted facility and they are having problems with their connection right now, being on Cogent at all. Apparantly Redmond is with them as well.
Ah, there isn't any routing info that has to change at the modem end. The way routing works is that you don't know the whole route from end to end, it's figured out as you go.
From your computer there's only 1 path it can take, out the modem and to the ISP (unless you have multiple connections to your home network). Where to goes from there depends on the destination and how the ISP has their network setup. A pretty typical situation would be something like this:
So, there's nothing your modem has to "know" about the routing, it just sends it to the ISP's routers for them to figure it out. If it's taken them that long to fix the problem then they probably don't have a good multi-homed setup or they have a lot of static routing that needs to be changed or Level 3 and/or Cogent are still advertising the route as valid but are blocking the traffic.
TWRR can change their routing tables all the time. They could completely change backbone providers for that matter. The only effect the end user would see could be changes in response times and transfer speeds to various sites since it's taking a new route. There can be some disruption in the initial change over until the routing change propogates but that should be fairly quick on the local network.How does that matter?
If you get a frame-relay connection, or a direct T1, you pay the telecom for the copper, but anybody you'd like can route your bits. This has been true for decades. Before, during, and now after the line leasing regulations. The only thing that's changed is the price. (It went down. A lot. Leasing a line was about $2k a month in the early '90s, and is between $150 and $750 now depending on where you live.)
You're talking about last mile communications. This story is about long haul communications.
Either way, don't expect the good third parties to go away anytime soon. The smart ones got contracts to go along with the regulations. Not that the local telcos aren't required by regulation to share their lines, they're still bound by the decade+ long contractual obligations to the CLECs. And even though they pretend to be upset by it, they're actually making a tidy profit on the bundling of voice services, and the generally higher cost they charge to the CLEC over what they can get out of a direct sale. They might talk big, but don't expect them to try very hard to get the likes of Worldcom and Covad out of their COs.
okay, cool. Tnx for the info... my question is off topic from my original post, but let me pick your brain a little more... From what I heard the meathod that L3 has taken against Cogent is to just block some traffic. To be specific they are allowing the BGP packets through, but nothing else from/to Cogent.. so the connection still looks valid and traffic will still route through. If this is the case, it seems like a simple solution for Cogent is to pull the OC96 from their router to mark the connection as down and reroute traffic, but again, from what I've read it seems like L3 is blocking all cogent originating traffic, even traffic that has traveled via another tier-1 peer.... which the only way that would be beleivable is if RRTW is single homed via L3... not likely IMHO. So that being the case why not just pull the plug? I've heard this isn't the first time L3 has done this and if that is the case, could it just be a Cogent trying to do a stand off?
How about a spell checker for slashdot, or even more impressive, a spell checker for strings in C-Code? Use lint! -DG
You said... " You could switch to DSL, where you could get whatever provider you liked."
In reply to this, I was simply stating that when getting DSL, it is no longer possible with many telco's to get whoever you want to provide your DSL. Now it is normally only the telco who will let you get DSL through them only.
Your ignorance is infinitely greater than you realize.
It's still the case with most telcos though. Even many of the ones that require you to buy the circuit through them still allow you to choose whichever carrier you like for your internet traffic. SBC is a good example of this, though they don't really advertise it.
I think the real question is: "When does something become standard Public infrastructure?"
Remeber, for a good long while all long maintained roads in the USA were privately owned. Eventually the people realized why this was no longer a good idea (making the endlessly debatable assumption that it was a good idea to create new roads in this fashon in the first place)--larger critical roads were bought and/or expropriated and are now public property in most cases.
Listen, You seem to keep responding while ignoring what I'm actually saying, so i'm going to spell it out to you.
Customers of some ISPs that have routes out both to the L3 side and Cognent side CAN NOT access any Cognent controlled networks (AS174). In some cases it has to do with not knowing another route to that network. In other cases it has to do with Cognent blocking a path they just don't want used. Case A is Level3's issue, Case B is Cognents. Either way, the downstream guy is screwed.
Look. Here's me trying to get to Level3 side:
And here's me trying to get to something on the Cognent side:
The fact that RoadRunner is sending my packets via ATDN via Verio to get to AS174 shows me that the pinned route RR previously had (ie, all traffice for cognent side, haul via Verio which Cognent bought) is still up, but Cognent is actively blocking the traffic. If they didn't block it, we wouldn't know they were depeered and this would be a non-story. Now, I can't tell you that previously the data was backhauled via the AS3356 (Level3) network, but this is my guess. I just don't have any tracerts from then.
:
But not that Cognent is the only bad guy in this, Level3 has no advertised routes to AS174. Check http://www.level3.com/LookingGlass/
And from what I read on NANOG they are filtering advertisments of the AS174 routes from reaching anyone on their side. So even if you could route through L3 to Sprint to get to Cognent, you wouldn't know.
-Malakai
A Dragon Lives in my Garage
If cogent simply shut down their peering session with L3, that still should not prevent users from getting to L3's network. Cogent is peered with other Tier 1 providers, and traffic should take that route, for example:
Instead of Cogent -> L3
We have Cogent -> MCI ->L3
However, if users on either network cannot access the other, it means that at least one of those providers is actively filtering all routes coming from the other's AS through their other peers. Why would they do this? If I were a customer, I'd be pissed, and I'd probably leave and go to another Tier 1 provider that wasn't Cogent or L3. Seems childish to me.
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
In case you want to monitor the situation...
x ?Login=Y&Username=public&Password=public
http://scoreboard.keynote.com/scoreboard/Main.asp
Ah, my kingdom for modpoints. We need more anti-propagandists around here.
Could this explain why I can't get to wikipedia today?
What is with you people? -- thinking your world represents everyone else's experience.
Actually, this is affecting the Department of Defense...one particular webserver in fact.
The LAST thing anyone would want to do right now is piss off the DoD. Just ask Iraq. I mean, this COULD be considered a "terrorist denial-of-service" attack in which case the DoD/Homeland Security would barge in, take over, and put things back the way they were.
Yeah, while I gave up on reading all the comments it sounds like the route is still being advertised but the traffic is being blocked. I don't know who RRTW uses for their connections. It doesn't really matter though if L3 is still advertising an invalid route. RRTW could be multi-homed with any number of providers but if the route to Cogent via L3 still seems the best then their routers will keep trying to send traffic that way. The only way I can think of to get around that is to set up static routes for all of Cogent's IPs to force the traffic to take other paths but that's a pain in the ass to set up.
As for why Cogent doesn't turn off the link (could just shutdown the interface vs. pulling the fibre). Well they've got a big marketing thing going now by offering free traffic for a year to anyone affected if they hook up with them. If they disable the interface then that makes the problem invisible and doesn't encourage people to switch over to them. Meanwhile it sounds like L3 may have a legitimate beef regarding how much traffic Cogent was sending them vs. how much they were sending to Cogent. If that's true than they do have the right to cancel the peering agreement and by keeping things broken they're probably hoping for that to force Cogent into paying for a connection to them.
http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:NOS3HJhX9jcJ:ww w.merit.edu/mail.archives/nanog/msg11606.html+coge nt+level3&hl=en&client=firefox-a
Most smaller ISPs focus on niche markets, including home and/or small businesses, but that doesn't mean Tier 1 ISPs don't also serve those markets.
Disclaimer: I work for a Tier 1 ISP, and we'll sell you just about anything if you don't mind our prices, but this is my own personal opinion about the market, not official corporate policy.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Most major ISPs use BGP for external routes, with filters to control what they do and don't accept. *Internal* routing is a different story - most ISPs do most of their internal routing with OSPF or ISIS (or perhaps EIGRP), but that doesn't mean there isn't also a lot of manual hackery to "improve" things. One of the advantages of MPLS or (back in the day) ATM infrastructure under the IP is that it gives you a lot more hooks for tuning your network, but if you're not running them, then static is one way to do it, if you don't mind the large amounts of manual effort and occasional brokenness. It's a tradeoff of fragile stability vs. much more resilient instability.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Mad or not, that is exactly the scenario that happened here.
Cogent and Level3 ar both tier1 ISPs. That means they do not have any upstream in place, beacuse they are part of the group that is upstream of last resort.
Whoever switched this peering off is trying to break tier 1, or, more likely
both are now speculating that the other one blinks and relegates himself out
of tier 1 by bying upstream from one of the other tier1s that still have
universal connectivity.
This is a very bad and dangerous process in my mind. This could end by the other tier-1s taking sides, effectively fracturing tier1 (and thus, the internet) in two halves.
Or it could end with most or all of them mobbing one of them out of tier1, which is very bad in itself as well.
Or it could prompt regulation - which is not that desirable, too, and will likely increase bandwidth cost for all of us.
Tie 1 is a concept that works reasonably well. Breaking it without very good reasons and a well communicated plan of action is highly irresponsible.
It took us a *long* time to get the Feds out of the way. MAE-East and MAE-West really were successful, but of course they couldn't keep up with the rapid growth of the Internet, and for the US Tier 1 providers, private peering has been a necessity for a long time. The carrier I work for has about 1 Gbps of public peering and 200 Gbps of private peering, and most of the other carriers we peer with are also too big to fit on the MAEs any more. On the other hand, Equinix has largely supplanted the MAEs, and mostly provides rack space, access, and cheap fiber cross-connects rather than active switching, so much of that "private peering" is still concentrated in half a dozen buildings, with the connections happening at Layer 1 instead of Layer 3.
Other markets have different evolutionary paths and different architectures - LINX, for instance, is huge (I lost track of its size when it passed 20 Gbps; it's probably 100 Gbps by now), and is extremely effective for the UK market and as a major interconnect for EU-wide carriers, and AMSIX is also pretty big. But London really *is* the geographically hub for UK business that uses the Internet, and is a good hop-off point for EU carriers that want to cross the Atlantic, while the US market was initially dominated by two locations 5000km apart, with some major users in between or within 500km on the coasts.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Cogent's business model is to sell large bandwidths for a low price, usually in multi-tenant office buildings. So they'd drop a fiber into the basement, and sell 100 Mbps ethernet connections to businesses in the building for about the price other carriers would charge for a T1 (that was back when a T1 was typically $1000 instead of $300; I haven't followed Cogent's prices in the last year or two.) Could you expect to get 100 Mbps consistently all the time? Not realistically, but you *could* expect to get lots more bandwidth than a T1 almost all the time, so it was a pretty competitive deal.
But at the end of the Interent boom, every carrier's finances looked pretty unstable, and a very aggressive business model that depends on getting free peering from big carriers while stealing their business customers looked extremely volatile :-) So does it make business sense for a Tier 1 provider to peer with Cogent as opposed to charging them money for Transit? Maybe, maybe not, and it looks like Level3 used to give them free peering but has changed their mind about it. Not the first time something like that has happened to Cogent - they've been back and forth on this with one or more carriers over the last few years. L3 seems to have decided that there's not enough reason to care about Cogent customers to give them free service.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Certainly looks like the first indication that something was coming, no? Guess the negotiations went south and L3 took it up a notch.
We are a single-homed customer with Cogent. Now we have no connectivity and it's a disaster for our business. It will take 45 days to get a second T1 line. Anyone have any ideas on what we can do?
Well put, and with major corporate interests involved, a scary scenario. Imagine a "goodwill" gesture between one of these guys and a major oil company unhappy with the level of service it's getting from oh say Venezuala.
insecurity asks the wrong question irritation gives the wrong answer
i wonder: have you seen cogent's books? other than a bailout from cisco a few years ago, i don't think they have much in the way of cash to dump transit at below-cost. if you know otherwise, please do tell. if you don't, please don't sound so certain about it.
Having dial-in customers on one network and mail/web services on another, this depeering caused a temporary problem for us too. Fortunately, we have set of multi-homed servers in various locations on the internet and created a solution that allows clients on one network to access servers on the other. If you are in this position, please go to Config.com for more information.
FreeBSD user in Ravenna, Ohio
You utter stupid rubbish and have no clue yourself.
You confuse peering and transit. Cogent sending their L3 traffc via, say Verizon, would violate their peering agreement with Verizon. They would have to pay Verizon for transit/upstream. OTOH, in their case, L3 would not have to pay anything since they still peer with Verizon, and since now Cogent pays Verizon as upstream, Cogent would now be considered part of Verizons network for peering purposes with L3.
So, if Cogent blinks first, they would be forced to leave tier1 and raise their own traffic cost by paying for upstream, while L3 would'nt pay anything.
Right now L3 cutting the peering in fact does stop all traffic between their two network clouds, until one of them starts shelling out the money to get traffic flowing again.
Initially I thought this was Level 3's poor relations and decisions, but then I read this article at Gamergod.com: http://www.gamergod.com/article_display.cfm?articl e_id=329. Now I am not so sure. Raises a lot of questions about who is in the wrong, although clearly the consumers are the ones that are suffering regardless of blame.
According to an article on NANOG, L3 gave Cogent 50 days advance warning to make other arrangements. Cogent didn't, preferring to play chicken and hope it made L3 look worse than Cogent so they'd back down. At this point, both drivers are barrelling down the road at each other, blindfolded, tossing spare steering wheels out the window, but unfortunately for Cogent, L3 is driving a bulldozer...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Bill, with all due respect, "stealing their business customers" is another word for competition. ISPs should be able to peer despite of competing in the marketplace - after all Cogent takes L3's packets as free as L3 takes Cogent's in a peering situation. And it has been widely argued that L3 has subnstantially less content in its realsm, so this is even a larger advantage for L3 thatn for Cogent.
What you describe here is anticompetitive behaviour, is certainly wrong, and possibley even illegal.
Are you trying to tell us that you are too snobbish to peer with yourself ?? Heck, that's hefty, even for a FreeBSD user.
Gee whiz, did you even read my post? I said we were effected by this too, until we found resolution today, basically using one of our multi-homed co-located servers.
;)
I'm saying we have a potential solution to help other small guys, but we are small enough ourself that we can't perform the service completely for free! Call me and we'll discuss it as we have real cost involved, although reasonable... We just can't afford to resolve this issue for everyone effected freely due to the nature of the issue(s)! Indeed, if we had an easy solution that wouldn't potentially kill us economically, we'd do it, or certainly share the knowledge of how to, freely.
BTW, anyone who knows me or others working @config.com would laugh at your snobbish accusation.
Best 'net regards,
Joe
FreeBSD user in Ravenna, Ohio
Just to clarify, Cogent is NOT a Tier 1 ISP. They are a Tier Wannabe. L3 is a Tier 1. IIRC, Cogent used to be Tier 1, but they got de-peered.
I'm at Purdue right now, and as a result of this "disagreement" I can't access a number of sites that I frequent. Off the top of my head I can't get to penny arcade, bash.org. DeviantArt sorta works, I can get to the site, but none of the images display, so the point of the site is kinda defeated for the time being. I hope this gets fixed soon, it's such an inconvenience.
Hopefully this doesn't bolster the UN's case to wrestle control of the internet out of the US's hands.
What's really going on here is that Cogent is an infamous spamhaus, so egregeious that likewise-infamous spamhaus Level3 has blocked them in an attempt at self-defense, due to what amounts to a gigantic DDoS carried out by Cogent's armies of spammers.
Just because spammers advertising a Web page in Cogent IP space may be sending their spam through insecure servers in China or Comcast or Roadrunner IP space, that doesn't make Cogent any less culpable for hosting the spamvertised Web pages in the first place.
I despise Level3 / SpewSpew.net. But I hate Cogent more. If this results in Cogent's spammers having less access to DDoS my in-box, I'm all for it.
If anyone is taking requests, I'd like to see Comcrap, Roadrunner, and all of China, Korea, and Russia cut off from the rest of the Net next, please.
Sure about Qwest, internettrafficreport.com says that many of ts nodes have 50% packet loss. That is enough to kill an Application Service Provider delivered software.
UUNet has nodes wth 0 packets gettng throughç
This kind of situation is outrageous. It doesn't matter who's "right." It's much simpler than all the technobabble going on here:
At every point in time, both Level3 and Cogent had actions they could have taken to prevent the split that occurred, and is still occurring.
Even if Cogent had to temporarily pay Level3 what Level3 asked for while they figured out an alternative arrangement, they should have done it.
These companies have their priorities backwards. Let me put this in bold: You do not screw over your customers in order to gain leverage in a contract dispute.
Any customer of either of these companies should leave them. This is a cardinal sin. The fact that either company would even CONSIDER doing this should be the final nail in the coffin for both of them. If you're in the business of providing a service that is mission-critical for your customers, your first priority needs to be making sure that the service is available. Once that's ensured, then you can deal with all the back-end issues, like how you can avoid paying Level3 money you don't feel you should be paying them, or figuring out how to get money you feel Cogent should be paying you.
There isn't anything unethical here, per se, but anyone who's a customer of either company should be concerned and insulted, and leave them, to make sure the message is sent, that this kind of behavior is unacceptable, unprofessional, and simply bad business.
As another post said, a lot of small businesses and home users got caught in the crossfire here, and what makes this so inexcusable is that Level3 and Cogent knew they'd be burning some of their customers by handling their dispute in this way, and they went ahead and did it anyway. Shame on BOTH of them.
Exactly!
Look how much the telco infrastructure has changed since 1970. Look at how the usage of that infrastructure has changed. Look at how the organization and administration of that infrastructure has changed.
The telco companies of the 1970s fought desperately to prevent these changes from occurring. "What will happen, they asked," if the telco system changes! "It will be a Bad Thing!"
But in reality, the nature of the telco infrastructure in 1970 is totally irrelevant to the nature of the telco infrastructure today, except for history students interested in tracing its evolution.
All I'm saying is that people who are anxious to preserve the Internet in its current form are probably just as doomed, and just as misguided, as the telcos of the 1970s who were anxious to preserve their telco infrastructure in its 1970 form.
In other words, so what if it changes in exactly the way the article describes? It's bound to change anyway, and chances are we'll find enough value in the changes as to make the current form of the Internet seem stupid, lame, and totally irrelevant.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Well, from an end-user perspective...
In 1970 I could dial (xxx)yyy-zzzz, the phone would ring and I could talk to someone or get a busy signal.
I expect that in 2035 I'll be able to sit down at a computer, bring up a web-browser, type in www.***.com and look at someone's site. (Or at a lower level I can route IP traffic to/from any IP addresses in certain blocks w.x.y.z for machines that are online.)
Other than that it's just boring implementation details.
But with this particular change, some computer users can no longer type in www.*****.com and bring up the site they're looking for. (Or route IP traffic to/from certain w.x.y.z's) If the trend continues, that's a major step backwards.
Not just that things will change, but that the Internet will change, and that anybody anxious to preserve it in its current form, or fearful of possible evolutionary steps it might take, are just as doomed and misguided as the telcos of the 1970s who worried about preserving their precious telco infrastructure in its 1970 form.
The prediction is secondary; the primary point of my post was the question: Given that things will change, and that the Internet will change radically, so what if the Internet changes in exactly the way the article describes?
After all, there's nothing about the Internet that suggests to me that its current form should be preserved, or even that the Internet is critical to the success of the species that invented it. Therefore, again, so what if it changes?
I take it that you are intimidated by the question I'm asking, so rather than try to answer it, and rather than just keeping silent, you've decided to bring to the debate all the wit and wisdom of an 8 year-old frat boy.
But there I go with the obvious again. Maybe I should be a psychologist!
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Perhaps it might be more appropriate to compare the Internet to the earliest telephone implementations, rather than to the well-established telco infrastructure of the 1970s.
...
My sense is that the Internet is still in its infancy, and that its future form(s) may well abandon the whole "www.foo" and "routed IP traffic" concepts in favor of something much more advanced, robust, and long-lived.
Also, that it's not clear that the Internet is a "step forward" in the long run, nor that this or that technological experiment or setback is really a "step back".
Also, that while the telco system changes didn't involve many end-user changes (although it did involve the major change of allowing end-users and third parties to manufacture, install, and service their own equipment on the telco infrastructure), that doesn't mean that changes to the Internet must not involve any end-user changes. Perhaps that's the part that will need the most changing?
Also, that while the telco changes didn't involve many overt changes to the routinging protocols, that doesn't mean that the Internet's routing protocols must never change. Nor does it mean that the Internet's routing protocol changes must be backwards-compatible with obsolete routing methods.
Also, that it's not at all clear that being able to type "www.foo" from anywhere and get to where you want to go is truly important, even in the context of the Internet, and therefore so what if it stops working?
Also, that it's not at all clear that anything truly important hinges on the success of the Internet in its current form, and therefore so what if it stops working?
=========
MONKEY: Thanks to routing disputes between Level 1 ISPs, I can't always get routed to the website I desire!
PANTS: So what?
MONKEY: But I could yestreday!
PANTS: So what?
MONKEY: But it was cool!
PANTS: So what?
MONKEY:
PANTS: No, seriously, so what? What is so important about being able to get to your website from anywhere in the world, that we must make sure never to do anything that might jeopardize that? You got by just fine without it the day before yestreday. Why wouldn't you get by just fine without it the day after tomorrow?
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Looks like Level3 and COGENT may be "working" again.......
x ?Login=Y&Username=public&Password=public
Keynote has them back online !!!!
http://scoreboard.keynote.com/scoreboard/Main.asp
Peter
The internet is broken! oh noes! alright sorry, I just had to post that.
I agree the internet is still fairly primitive, however I think you miss the point.
While the form of IP routing might change (say IPv4 to IPv6 or beyond) I hardly think packet switched networks are going anywhere any time soon. In the electronic world claiming packet switching will become obsolete is almost like claiming the wheel will become obsolete... There are certain inventions that make sense and that will never just go away. Packet switching is one of these (DNS may not be).
it's not clear that the Internet is a "step forward" in the long run
If you think things are still unclear, you either don't understand what "the internet" is or we're not talking about the same things when we say the word "internet" (or Internet...). An automatic generic global information sharing infrastructure is a GIGANTIC step forward from what came before. Comparing that to the telephone is like comparing the telephone to the telegraph (or worse).
Modifying the infrastructure so that the pathways are no longer "any to any" is a step backwards.
that doesn't mean that changes to the Internet must not involve any end-user changes. Perhaps that's the part that will need the most changing?
A network infrastructure actually has very little to do with the data that flows over it. It doesn't really matter what applications are written to make use of IP, TCP, UDP, DNS et al. What matters in infrastructure is only how those low level pieces might change or be changed. Writing some fancy new XML based protocol for eCommerce is in no way shape or form an infrastructure change. As to implementation level changes, in most cases those shouldn't affect the application level either. Decoupling is a two-way street, and universal last-mile/end-point changes are usually *very expensive*.
PANTS: No, seriously, so what? What is so important about being able to get to your website from anywhere in the world, that we must make sure never to do anything that might jeopardize that? You got by just fine without it the day before yestreday. Why wouldn't you get by just fine without it the day after tomorrow?
No seriously. My ex-girlfriend and I communicate between Seattle and Buffalo via IM. If we're on the wrong sides of this new digital devide, we won't be able to talk. But I suppose I won't *die* if I can't talk to her any more. (Though I probably would have changed ISP's if I'd lost this ability, even for a short time...)
You must be right, the world doesn't *need* an effective and reliable information infrastructure. After all, what you don't know can't hurt you and ignorance is bliss.
I'm not too familair with this kind of stuff, but wouldn't it be possible (for example), for one customer who is connected only to the "cogent side" to connect to some computer on the "level 3" side by having packets routed through some other Level 1 ISP (pick any that is connected to both).
Am I missing something?
You must be right, the world doesn't *need* an effective and reliable information infrastructure.
Oh, the world "needs" effective and reliable information infrastructure, alright. And the world *has* effective and reliable information infrastructures.
But this article strongly implies that the Internet is not such an infrastructure (e.g., the lack of guaranteed connectivity between feuding backbone providers). My question is, to the extent that the Internet is not such a (i.e., to the extent that it proves to be ineffecitve and unreliable), so what if it deteriorates?
So far we've been arguing about the Internet's importance and/or stability. But what about the other aspect of the question: what would happen if the Internet turns out to be less stable/effective/reliable in its current form than we thought? My guess is we'll promptly discover that, VOIP notwithstanding, the Internet also isn't as useful as we thought. (More precisely, my guess is we'll find that other implementations of similar networking ideas are even more useful, effective, and reliable, and that the obsolete architectures may or may not be integrated into the new solutions, but will not be overly missed if and when they are abandoned.)
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Err... I know I shouldn't reply to sigs and all... but all I can say is ???eh???!!!??!! You must really hate organization!
But this article strongly implies that the Internet is not such an infrastructure (e.g., the lack of guaranteed connectivity between feuding backbone providers). My question is, to the extent that the Internet is not such a (i.e., to the extent that it proves to be ineffecitve and unreliable), so what if it deteriorates?
Heh. By this comment I guess we've mostly been arguing semantics all along.
The thing is... The internet is really all we've got at the moment, so we'll probably work on patching it first and revamping it second. (Yes, amazing and unexpected news I know...)
Note: Voice was already done in the telcom networks of the 70's, so VOIP really isn't all that big a deal. Don't shortsell the ability of random/generic applications to communicate in an "any to any" manner with each other over a global network. In my (At the moment inebriated) opinion that is the "killer app" of the internet. (Yes HTML etc is a very powerful way to share information among organizations working on varous projects... For one thing it moots the need for project teams to provide updated manuals on large projects as mentioned in the mythical-man-month. That alone is a huge cost savings, but at the same time it's only one example of what a generic information network can provide above and beyond a mere telecommunications network.)
Thank you for the stimulating debate. It seems to me that when it comes to the practicalities of the real world, your views are closer to the truth than mine.
My hypothetical questions are interesting to me, but probably not very realistic.
Regarding my sig: Actually, I like organization. I see organization (in reasonable amounts) to be key to the success of any worthwhile endeavor. The sig is a jab at libertarians who seem to think that it's possible to have a well-organized community that doesn't end up looking exactly like a community with a government.
But that's a whole different can of worms, right there.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
It means if they get into a peering dispute there is a VERY high chance you will be cut off from part of the internet. A big tier 2 otoh will probablly have both its own peering arrangements and upstreams to muliple tier 1 ISPs so is less likely to cut you off from parts of the internet.
of course being multihomed yourself is the safest course of action though it does bring complications of its own.
finally multiple internet connections with nat are a possibility (see the linux advanced routing and traffic control howto). This may be simpler and cheaper to set up than true mulihoming (it doesn't require any cooperation from the isps) and if one of your lines has trouble reaching a certain site you can simply reconfigure your routing to put all traffic to that site on the other one.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register