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Sprint Cuts Cogent Off the Internet
superbus1929 writes "I work as a security analyst at an internet security company. While troubleshooting an issue, we learned why our customer couldn't keep his site-to-site VPN going from any location that uses Sprint as its ISP: Sprint has decided not to route traffic to Cogent due to litigation. This has a chilling effect; already, this person I worked with cannot communicate between a few sites of his, and since Sprint is stopping the connections cold (my traceroutes showed as complete, and not as timing out), it means that there is no backup plan; anyone going to Cogent from a Sprint ISP is crap out of luck."
Heh, I was wondering why scoreboard showed they were having issues:
http://scoreboard.keynote.com/scoreboard/Main.aspx
*sigh*
So it wasn't just an outage.
I touch computers in naughty places
Sprint-Nextel and Clearwire go before the FCC on November 4 to seek approval for a merger. It seems very fishy that this Cogent story is breaking right now. Anybody have any ideas on why Sprint might pull a stunt like this as a means to GAIN FCC approval? Or is the story originating from a competitor? Just doesn't look right, especially with the price of Sprint stock scraping bottom lately, despite the huge influx of investment from Google and others. (Billions.) Somebody please explain.
This is what the world might look like without Net Neutrality.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
When my local phone company was having a labour dispute, they blocked the union website. Granted, this incident appears to be on a much larger scale.
My ISP at the time (Interbaun, recently bought by Uniserve) was also affected: They resell the Telus ADSL sevice (because the phone company owns the lines).
http://thetyee.ca/News/2005/08/04/TelusCensor/
According to the link I Dug up, it was back in 2005.
Our company buys quite a bit of transit from Cogent, and Sprint's looking glass sites are showing a complete partition between the two. Also, Cogent has offered free 100Mbit connectivity to any on-net Sprint customers until the issue is resolved.
I think what happened in Monticello, MN with the city laying down their own fiber when TDS telcom (the local telco) refused to is definitely a step in that direction...
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
You'd probably want to check the SLA first. Most have provisions that don't apply to this, at least contractually. As an end-customer you'd be buying access to their public network -- if they choose to depeer or black hole another network, they're usually within the right to do that since THEY own the network you're connecting to. Bad business sense yeah, but otherwise it's probably not breaking any contractual agreement with a customer.
Funny how history repeats itself, especially in Sprint's case. In 1996, Sean Doran (SprintLink senior network architect) decided CIX-W peering was no longer cool and dropped peering, causing one hell of a black hole. From my recollection, it was the first instance where open routing was disabled due to political or commercial objectives, and unfortunately for Sprint, it came at a time where Bob Collett (then head of SprintLink) was trying to promote Sprint's openness and participation in the community. Bob overruled his engineer and routing was restored several days later.
Since that point, BGP black holes have continued, usually to the detriment of customers. BBN Planet, Exodus and numerous others played the game presuming that content was more important than eyeballs or vice versa. The fallacy in their model is that content without consumer is as useless as consumer without content. Until they establish that understanding, neither unbalanced provider will succeed.
As of now, there are no laws that an ISP has to deliver packets to any site, or any port.
IMHO, this is just the start of this type of activity. Eventually (assuming no regulation is done), ISPs will just refuse traffic from any domain who doesn't pay them a certain amount per bit per month. So, if Yahoo doesn't pay ISP "A" a fee so their bits will go across, all that ISP's subscribers would see either the destination unreachable, or even worse, be redirected to another site.
As of now, there are no laws against ISPs doing this. One could in the future attempt to go to their bank, be redirected to another bank because the other bank pays the ISP to carry their traffic and refuse the other bank access.
All of Cogent's previous de-peering problems were ultimately due to their ultra low prices and their ability to steal customers. I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case again. Everyone has a lot of money to lose with Cogent's $6/Mbps pricing today. It undercuts everyone else. Cogent is basically wiping them clean (and not making much money in the process.) Ultimately they are banking on MUCH larger uses in the future. But their business model is not exactly profitable.
Re - "It is the wish of my client." -- I'm reminded of what Richard Nixon's lawyer famously said while arguing before the US Supreme Court in US v. Nixon: "The President wants me to argue that he is as powerful a monarch as Louis XIV, only four years at a time, and is not subject to the processes of any court in the land except the court of impeachment." He knew it was a nutty position to take, so he explicitly stated that it was his client's position, not his.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
There was also a depeering incident between Cogent and Telia earlier this year.
Cogent was the one to pull the plug in that case, but it doesn't really matter -- it got pulled because Cogent had a dispute with one of its peers, and they no longer found it mutually beneficial to interconnect. Cogent finds itself in these kinds of situations disproportionately often.
Also, the other way around; they cut Telia off not that long ago.
What is really needed is a (number of) neutral peering points. It doesn't really matter if your customers are running so many servers that your bandwidth to the peering point is insufficient, or if your customers are surfing so much on sites on the other side of the peering point, you just buy more bandwidth. Obviously this doesn't work if you want to route traffic through someone else's network, only if you want to reach/want to be reachable by someone on a neighbouring network. It's the way things usually work in Europe, and I can't remember any cases of ISPs disconnecting from any of the peering points, because that would certainly make their customers really angry.
Internet service has the implied meaning that given a public IP address, you should be able to contact any other public IP address without interference by a 3rd party. There are private networks and public networks. So what? If an entity wants to be a player in the internet game they need to be prepared to play by the rules. Or they should be stripped of their rights to participate in the network.
Occam's razor is the blind faith in the natural selection of least resistance and in universal oversimplification. -- EF
http://www.forbes.com/technology/forbes/2008/1013/064.html
0xfeedface
Am I understanding this correctly? Sprint is reporting the packets as delivered but they are actually dropped? If so, why isn't this criminal fraud? If FedEx took your money, told you the package was delivered, but then threw the package away, there would be severe criminal and civil penalties. Existing law about lying and forgery needs to be applied to packet headers (also applies to the forged reset packets Comcast was using to throttle P2P traffic). If I'm misunderstanding the situation, I would appreciate it if someone could explain why.
My family had an issue with fraud using Sprint cell phones - we had a $20 / month cell phone plan, maximum of 30 minutes a month, for emergency uses only. We had our plan for 2 years until someone got a social security number and opened a series of phones attached to the plan. With the new phone fees and the insane amount of overage charges, our monthly bill went from $20 to $1500, three months in a row.
When we called Sprint's customer service department, they couldn't cancel the charges because nobody in the company was allowed to talk to the fraud investigation department. Nine months of complaints, refusals to pay, and BBB calls later, we finally got all the charges dropped, but I'll never work with Sprint again.
To over-generalize the contributions of one profession or the other on society is specious.
I'm not over generalizing, or even generalizing at all. A Mathematician pursuing his profession doesn't radically alter the structure of society. Engineers and physicists are more likely to. A Lawyer pursuing his profession can and sometimes does, often for the worse.
To rebut your bald statement about the destructive nature of lawyers, it's worth noting that lawyers are responsible for: creating civil liberties such as the right for women and the right for 'colored' people to vote and attend school with white people; writing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; defending Galileo Galilei when he published a "truth" (mathematics) when the church persecuted him for challenging their proprietary access to absolute "truth".
It was a bald statement, but not an absolute one. Your rebuttal fails, though, when you consider that there were lawyers arguing against all of those civil liberties and the rest. Those people *are* scum.
Finally, some attribute the commerce clause (and WTO/GATT-like reductions in interstate discriminatory trade practices) with the creation of more wealth in the United States than any other law in the US federation.
The interstate commerce clause as it was intended is great, but I obviously wasn't talking about that which is why I spoke of the mockery which has been made of it. All the various farm welfare programs, drug laws and the like are all justified by the sleazy, entirely unjustifiable interpretation of it to mean that the government can do anything to anyone anywhere since anything could possibly have an affect on some form of commerce.
That was a scumbag lawyer who pushed that bullshit through may he burn in hell.
With your position, no one would ever have challenged segregation in the Southern US, the right for women to vote, the right for women to have abortions, or other now often considered fundamental rights; and
No, with my position there never would have been a need to challenge such things as there was never any justification for them in the first place.
That is unintelligible nonsense. As one specific rebuttal, contingency fees give good lawyers economic incentive to engage in representation for claims by people who otherwise could not afford access to justice.
No, it's a simple statement of the facts as they are. Explain, if you would, how I can get a good lawyer on contingency when I'm charged with a crime? There's no payoff to cover the fees. I get a public defender which means basically pot luck. There are very good lawyers in the public defender's office and very poor ones. I had the misfortune to need a public defender long ago when I got the shit beat out of me by some cops who then charged me with assault (when my foot hit one of their shins when they were running up to beat me on the head with their maglite when I was already cuffed and maced) destruction of property (when said flashlight no longer worked after impacting my cranium) and resisting arrest (when I was on the ground covering my head yelling "I'm not resisting arrest"). I had 2 witnesses who testified and all of those specifics were brought up in court and not refuted. I still lost because my lawyer had more fun making assinine arguments which while logically valid were ridiculous and pissed off the jury. I saw the moment at which I lost in the juror's faces when my lawyer was going off on his third such tangent. Had I been able to afford a decent lawyer at the time it would have been an open and shut case and then I might have been able to get a lawyer on contingency to sue the city, but without being able to afford a competent lawyer for the criminal trial that avenue was cut off.
Hell, OJ got away with murder solely due to his ability to afford a row of sleazy lawyers.
Without lawyers, you wouldn't have to consider what it would be like to live in this world- we still would.
However, once again yo
The UK is doing better [iht.com] lately.
You know, this kind of article really depresses me. Why is it that whenever there's some common sense and decency in our government that it's found in the archaic hold-overs from feudal traditions rather than the people we elected?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Because Sprint isn't merely unplugging things. they're actively blackholing (redirecting all traffic to nowhere) Cogent, which sabotages automatic route-around-damage systems, as it makes it seem like the data is being passed successfully.
UUCP allows you to pretty much manually route around by explicitly defining the path (a bangpath). Thanks to the wonderful redundancy of the internet, there is pretty much always a usable path between any 2 points, though said path may be ridiculously non-optimal, like going from Chicago to New York via Paris, Berlin, and Moscow, and thus likely won't get routed through automatically.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
One part of Cogent's business model is selling to multiple-tenant business buildings, where they can stick a router in the basement and run Fast Ethernet connections to multiple customers, and most of the 1300 buildings where they're on-net are either that kind of arrangement or else businesses they've built connections to directly (including some hosting centers.) For the MTU market, what this means is that all it costs them is some inside wiring and a bit of extra traffic on their free peering links.
Back around 2000 they were selling Fast Ethernet to this market for about the price most other carriers charged for 2-3 T1s (i.e. 3-4 Mbps for $2-4K.) I don't think most of their customers expected sustained dependable throughput of 100 Mbps for that price - but just about everybody expected to get more than 3 Mbps almost all the time, so it was a win, especially as a second carrier connection.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Renesys is a fairly neutral source for information about peering (as opposed to Cogent's press release, which is obviously their side of the story.) The Forbes article is good perspective, but it's from before Sprint dropped Cogent. BTW, Sprint and Cogent have only been peering for two years; before that Cogent had to pay to connect to them.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks