ISP Dispute Causing Connectivity Issues for Customers

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "A peering dispute between Telia and Cogent is causing routing and connectivity problems for many internet users. Cogent shut down their connections to Telia over what they described as a 'contract dispute' over the size and location of their peering points. Telia attempted to route around the problem, but Cogent blocked that, too. This has caused a lot of trouble for sites which are not multi-homed. Groklaw, for example, is on a Cogent network (MCNC.demarc.cogentco.com), so any Europeans connecting via Telia can't get through."

Comments

That's what happens...

[Doug52392]

This just goes to show you what happens when the money obsessed CEOs of corporations argue: The customers lose!

First post btw :)

Again?

[Constantine XVI]

Didn't this happen a few years back? Level3 and Cogent, IIRC

Re:YEAH!

[Doug52392]

Look at the comment below this...

Sorry, I was the First Poster :)

HA HA HA lol

Re:How much for only half an Internet?

[bagboy]

Do you people even read your TOS? You are not guaranteed anything without an SLA.

Death throws?

[davolfman]

In my limited experience de-peering like this usually precedes an ISP death. Other people have probably figured this out so it wouldn't surprise me if this is having a negative effect on stock prices. It makes you wonder why anyone would ever consider it a valid option if they aren't just a rat jumping ship. It just looks bad.

Re:Route around?

[dave562]

You're missing the fact that at the upper tiers of the internet, there are only so many routes available. There are simply somethings that can't be routed around because the ONLY route to where you want to go involves passing packets across the network you are trying to route around. Consider a smaller example. You want to route traffic to a Verizon DSL customer. Verizon has decided it doesn't want to pass your packets to the DSL customer. No matter how you try to route it, since Verizon sold the DSL service and controls the last few hops in the route, you simply can't route to the customer any other way.

The current issue involves "peering arrangements/agreements." Do a Google search if you want an in depth explination of what exactly a peering arrangement is all about. The short version is that ISPs agree to pass each others traffic across their networks. That's the way the internet works. Every ISP can't have a router in every place that a router needs to be placed. So they "share" each routes with each other.

Re:Route around?

[jroysdon]

I think the bigger problem is that some of Telia's links didn't have any other path except Cogent. That should mean that those Telia sites are totally dead in the water. If they're routing properly, and have multiple paths to other providers, it shouldn't matter if Cogent shuts down a link (except things just get slower).

Telia should be able to send traffic via their other link(s) which should also have peering at some point to Cogent. The other problem that I suspect the problem is that Cogent is dropping Telia traffic coming in from Cogent's other peers. Cogent shouldn't do this, it breaks the internet. If Cogent is announcing prefixes to other peers, they need to receive all non-abusive traffic from those other peers, not null-route it.

In short, even if I won't talk to you directly, if we have a mutual friend, we can route messages through that friend. However, it sounds like Cogent is just ignoring messages from Telia to spite them. They're actually doing both Telia and Cogent's customer's a disservice.

I'm not just guessing at this, I do BGP work regularly for 2 smaller ILECs and customers that are multi-homed with 2-4 peers each.

Re:How much for only half an Internet?

[adolf]

SLA == Service Level Agreement. Most Slashdotters seem to think that an SLA means something like "OMG! Wonderful fat pipe all for me!!!", but it's just a contract, much like the TOS that the same Slashdotters seem to blame for everything including world hunger.

In fact, since they're both just contracts, either one can be good for the customer, or bad for the customer. The only innate differences are three words at the top of the page, which is about as insignificant a distinction as I can think of.

Works fine...

[swehack]

I'm in Sweden on two connections, one bahnhof, which rents most of it's fiber from Telia, and one IP-Only which has it's own atlantic cable, both work fine against Groglaw for me. Which is funny really because i know Telia owns most of the fiber in Sweden and that Bahnhof for example rents most of it's fiber and equipment from Telia.

Re:Yep

[fingusernames]

Um, I used to use this Internet thingy when it was ARPAnet, before the advent of private backbones. I remember HOSTS.TXT and the real InterNIC. And yes, it was originally designed to route around major failures. That was one of the reasons DARPA, e.g. the military, funded it. It may have not done it perfectly, it may not have been able to survive a full-on nuclear conflict, but it was certainly designed and funded in good part as a research project into network robustness in the face of catastrophe.

Ever since the backbones went private though, all bets are off. You are entirely correct as of the early 90s. As we all know, it's "my network, my rules." Hence this peering spat, and the ones before, and the ones to come.

Larry

Re:How to get by these silly commercial blockades

[knarf]

Replying to my own posting here: Garden Networks' GTunnel works with wine on Linux so if you don't feel like setting up a Tor node and don't want to hunt for anonymizing proxies on the web you can use that instead. If you add the Switchproxy or (preconfigured for GTunnel etc.) GProxy extension to Firefox you can switch between your normal net connection (with or without proxy) and the anonymizer.