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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."
After the Cogent/Level 3 spat a few years ago, smarter network engineers realized it wasn't safe to use either Cogent or Level 3 as their sole Internet provider. Second provider? Sure. But not sole.
After this Cogent/Telia spat, no one with a brain will pick Cogent as their sole Internet provider.
This won't hurt Cogent too deeply. They charge so little for bandwidth that it's hard to resist picking them as your #2.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Quite a house of cards our fragile infrastructure has become. Somebody says "bomb" in San Francisco, and your flight from Mobile to Nashville will be grounded. A disagreement over the price causes droughts and blackouts in California. And our super robust internet can cut off whole countries with the snip of a cable or a flip of a switch. That's no way to run a circus, I say.
This message was brought to you by... BIGCO...where the nose meets the grindstone.
What?
You know, thats not true. In my area, I can choose Qwest DSL, charter cable, Clear-wire, small ISP's, etc. Every single one of them uses Qwest's fibers out of town. If Qwest gets into a spat with somebody, I can't access the internet, regardless of which ISP I am using locally. Keep in mind, I sit in a town that is on a main fiber route for williams, level 3, and a few others along the west coast, but none of them will sell any access locally. (were apparently too small of fish, which is a shame, williams cable has a set of buildings holding equipment about 100yards from where I am now sitting)
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
It's like an old telecom SS7 spat. Tell them to get over it. In three more days, we pull all our servers from and move on. Can't get to what we need? As ISPs, they have precious little time to figure it out, then we split. Go ahead, try and enforce that five-9's contract. Providers are everywhere, drooling for business. Bye-bye, blackout. Hello loneliness.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Um, the Internet is surely important, but I wouldn't suggest it is more critical to survival than roads or food
I would, because the organizations which provide us with food and other necessities are dependent upon the Internet. I doubt the average interstate trucking company would have any idea how to operate without the Internet and GPS. The entire supply chain is utterly dependent upon modern communications, from production to delivery. The tech just makes everything so damned efficient that we've largely forgotten how to get along without it. I think we're starting to see how dangerous that can be, given the caliber of the folks running said communications.
In any event, the way to handle the likes of AT&T/SBC, Comcast and the rest is very simple: it's called standards. That worked very well for the phone system for a hundred years: AT&T (the old AT&T) built out the most reliable communications system on the planet, but that's because they were a heavily-regulated monopoly which had enforced quality-of-service standards. Comcast and the rest can provide almost no service at all for what we pay them and they get away with it.
Unfortunately, the government itself is so corrupt that it's unlikely Congress would ever be able to implement any kind of ISP regulation that has teeth to it, much less enforce it. Hell, they fucking gave away some hundreds of billions of dollars to these assholes, and never bothered to ask for an accounting of where the hell it went.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
The TOS won't always get them off the hook. Claims made in ads can be considered part of the contract, even if they are disavowed in the TOS.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat