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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."
When was the last time you remember that Sprint customers were cut off from being able to call MCI subscribers?
I don't want massive regulation, but something simple to prevent deliberate cut-offs would be nice, and it appears that the free market didn't solve that problem.
Not only are businesses affected, but educational institutions are as well. At my workplace, we conduct many internet-based courses that completely *halted* when Level3 depeered Cogent. The professors of those courses had to quickly make major changes to their deadlines and course structure, to work around the outtage. That is the first time such actions have ever had to be taken here (including changes made due to hurricanes).
Tier 1 peering needs to be regulated in certain situations. The Cogent and Level 3 "who has the bigger dick" contest has caused isolated pockets where full routes/reachability to certain parts of the Internet wasn't available for some Cogent and L3 downstream customers. Get these big boys to maintain settlement free peering when a certain amount of the routing table "belongs" to them. simple.
Are they going to learn their lesson and strike peering agreements with more tier ones then just Level 3?
WARNING: Trollbait Investigations on what? This is an agreement between two private companies. The only investigation that happened with the NYC power outage was that state investigators went and bothered some poor saps in Edison Power and wondered why they were drawing power from another country. When they got the answer which was "Does everyone want to pay another $200 a year for more power?" they dropped it. This is nothing more than Cogent abusing a public aggreement and then pissing and moaning that they finally got cut off (because they are using someone else's backbone to transit traffic to another area of the world). Let face it ... noone needs to make any generalizations or comments on this sort of thing until they are part of it.
I assume that the phone companies and mobile companies have similar (though not identical) issues to this. Aren't they mandated to provide access to their networks to other providers (e.g., Vonage)? What restrictions/costs are typically involved?
Level 3 didn't just switch its connection to Cogent off, it left it running and tarpitted any traffic going through it. Like other people are saying, there'd be a class action against them if, say, they were a power company deliberately sending surges into other companies' grids.
the exact details of what was agreed to will probablly never be public
one possible condition could be moving some of the peering to other locations so level3 has to do less work and cognet has to do more to get the traffic between the desired endpoints. I belive depeerings have caused changes like that in the past.
another possiblity is the peering is theoretically setlement free but cognet may end up paying some of the "fines" mentioned.
yet another possibility is as you suggest level 3's customers said enough and they backed down but put in some secret conditions to try and save face and make it look like not thier fault.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register