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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."
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.
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
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
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