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Level 3 and Cogent Reach Agreement on Peering
Armour Hotdog writes "Level3 and Cogent have announced an agreement on a modified peering contract that provides for settlement-free peering subject to certain unspecified conditions. This is a welcome announcement considering the disruption caused earlier when Level3 depeered Cogent. After that earlier dispute, Level3 temporarily restored peering, but announced that they would once again depeer Cogent on November 9th, unless the parties could come to an agreement."
I think the "depeering" probably shouldn't have happened, and should not have affected people that weren't involved in the dispute, i.e. the rest of us. Had this happened with any other utility, there would be investigations.
Good! Everytime they do this, businesses are affected, on the backend if nothing else. It screws up B2B and EDI xactions like mad. If companies can prove that it affected their bottom line, what recourse do they have???
Sorry man... the Internet pooped on me.
After hearing hundreds of posts clamoring for government regulation (ie, slow to respond expensive monopoly), the best solution came quickly.
Why did this agreement happen? It happened because the market required it. Customers were unhappy, producers lost money, no one profited on either side.
If we pushed for regulation, how many years and billions of dollars would replace what two corporations did in a week or two on the demands of their customers?
Is it just me, or does Level 3's ultimatum sound alot like an old fashioned protection racket? How is this any different from the Don sending someone to smash up someone's shop after the owner misses a payment?
Is there any way to get law enforcement involved? What about a class action lawsuit?
Actually the dispute dates back to early July of this year. Hardly a quick resolution.
Give a man a fish, he eats for a day. Teach him to fish and he eats for the rest of his life.
If a government agency just enforced some prior restraint on the companies, what have they learned? Not to do what they did. What have they learned by being forced to solve their problem themselves? Not to do what they did, and also how to successfully negotiate with each other when things go awry, what the market really wants from each firm, how to rapidly re-evaluate corporate strategy in the face of adverse external events -- in short, how to be more "grown-up" in managing their own affairs.
(with-cluehammer "You don't get it. Tier 1s have lots of peering agreements. A peering agreement with someone else DOESN'T entitle you to use their network to get to a third -- that would be transit. Basically, these guys said they wouldn't exchange traffic directly for free, and they wouldn't pay some other provider to act as a go-between, which, if you understand how these things work (reputation, game theory and all that) is perfectly logical.")
Everybody's a libertarian 'till their neighbour's becomes a crack house.
I'm for some regulation of the Internet, but not here. These guys went back to the table because they each had guns to their heads; their customers (on both sides) didn't really care whose fault it was and would've started leaving.
Calling for regulation would likely lead to California energy crisis-type situations: PG&E and Con Ed were both required to retail (at a fixed price) stuff they had to buy wholesale (on the open market) and when the wholesale price went above retail, bankruptcy. (Don't get into market manipulation, that's a peripheral issue). The Internet has been remarkably successful precisely because any yahoo with a router and a cable crimper could build out more of it, without a license, approvals or anything else.
Everybody's a libertarian 'till their neighbour's becomes a crack house.
I am a sys admin for a small atlanta ga ISP, when Level3 de-peered you dialup users that were connecting to Level3 POPs couldnt connect, our call center was flooded and we were scrambling like mad to switch everone over to the Aligence Telcom POPs. L3 really needs to think about the broader ramifications of their actions.
Also, The internet is suposed to be dynamicaly routed, ya know BGP3 and so on. Why did this break so many things? If the route was down, shouldnt the routers just use the next best preffered?
If you resist reading what you disagree with, how will you ever acquire deeper insights into your own beliefs?
You're missing the point. Cogent isn't a Tier 1 ISP. They're close, but not quite. To be a Tier 1, that means you don't pay for peering -- period. Cogent does.
This was a fairly straightforward business problem. Settlement-free peering only occurs when its in the best interests of both parties to do so. There are massive costs still incurred on each end, but they simply don't exchange money. The traffic in both directions is equal enough that neither side is incurring a loss. L3 determined that they were, and announced to Cogent that their settlement-free peering agreement was going to end.
Rather than doing what they should have done, and either ponied up the cash to L3, or reached a transit agreement with another ISP (say, a tier 2) to receive L3's prefixes and get its own prefixes onto L3's network, Cogent allowed the depeering to occur and used the resulting disruption to the Internet to their own advantage by calling L3 out.
They, in effect, allowed a major outage to occur in order to avoid paying for transit to L3. L3 gave them something like 90 days notice, plenty of time for Cogent to develop a contingency plan.
Yet, they didn't. Thier customers immediately became unreachable from L3's network, and their customers were unable to reach L3. They allowed this situation to continue, leveraging it for a public relations backlash against L3, and attempted to lure L3 customers to Cogent.
I'll be the first to admit my understanding of the issue is not 100% -- so if I'm missing a critical point, please let me know. But, from my understanding, let me be the first to say this is not a major problem with the Internet, nor is it something that regulation would do anything to fix. This is a bullshit back-room business decision by an ISP trying to save a buck and make a name for itself.
Being a tier 1 means, essentially, HAVING NO DEFAULT ROUTES. You make deals with all the other tier 1 providers for direct connections at various places around the country and, if you can't colocate with a particular tier 1 in a particular geographic location, you pay another provider for transit from you to that tier 1. Being at the top of the pyramid, there's no default route you can hand packets off to when one of your connections fails - because that would mean somebody else was providing you with a free lunch.
Of course, these guys are constantly squabbling ("we're bigger than you, so you should be paying us for the privilege") but, since disconnecting affects both peers' customers, it's really cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Everybody's a libertarian 'till their neighbour's becomes a crack house.
A simple approach but obviously not the status quo method of deciding on who should pay for what..
L3 customers are requesting more traffic from Cogents customers then is going the other way. Why is any one direction of traffic considered a load and another considered a source for income and different from each other? It seems to me as these two companies are concerned, more L3 customers desire and need Cogent traffic then Cogent people that need the L3 traffic as noted by the obvious business difference that is raising this issue. Why is the traffic from Cogent considered Cogents traffic when in reality, you could consider it traffic requested by L3 paying customers? The traffic from Cogent to L3 is a mutual benefit to both Cogent supplying and L3 customers requesting equally. Cogent could claim that L3 is sucking down a disproportionate amount of its bandwidth compared to what they are own customers are getting back?
I know, not a status quo, that's the way is always has been, your an idiot, blah blah, but what makes one way right and accepted and the other not? Both ends have customers paying for the bandwidth they send and recieve.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.