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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."
In the new agreement, there are clauses that state that Level3 can again try to charge Cogent if their traffic amount is grossly over that of Level3's. So, while this is definitely an improvement, it doesn't rid all potential future problems.
If anything, this definitely hammers home the idea of multihoming...
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).
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.