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Behind the Cogent-Sprint Depeering
An anonymous reader brings an update to Sprint's depeering with Cogent, which we discussed a few days back — namely, Sprint's side of the story. According to them, no free peering contract had ever existed, Cogent refused to pay the bills to exchange traffic, and after a year Sprint gave Cogent 30 days notice of their intent to disconnect. During this 30-day period, when one or two connections (out of ten) per week were shut down, Cogent made no alternate arrangements to alleviate the impact on their customers — but they had a press release ready when Sprint snipped the final wire. It will be interesting to see how Cogent responds.
"It will be interesting to see how Cogent responds."
"When the internet senses damage it routes around it." Oh wait!
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
It's actually proving the point. Sprint and Cogent might have disconnected, but surely Sprint and Cogent's links were not mutually exclusive to the rest of the top tier players.
So yeah, some routers might need to update their tables, but otherwise, we're still connected. Proving the ARPANET design once again.
Feel free to correct me, but I seem to remember Cogent and Level-3 having a similar disagreement a few years back, with Cogent being just as intransigent then. Peculiar that a major peer like Cogent would be unable to resolve peering contracts twice in such a short period of time - were I a Cogent enterprise customer I'd be pretty concerned with the pattern that's developing here.
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!
I don't understand how any of this requires government regulation. Cogent is supposed to provide internet access to users and other companies. They are not doing that, so they either need to find someone else to peer with, or be sued for breach of contract. I wonder how many companies and individuals Cogent services? I bet they would make other arrangements real fast if their phones were ringing off the hook and the postman delivered a truck-load of court summons.
Um, how do you connect to the Entire internet? Can you define the internet? (hint, its not a series of tubes). Nobody could ever list that in a contract. I might have connections to L3, att, and cogent, but I can't guarantee that your packet will get through a backbone provider to a server in India. I couldn't even guarantee that the other companies I have connections to will constantly be working, and routing packets..
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
What proposed legislation has ever fixed an extant problem without making something else, and usually the original problem, worse?
In many European countries, legislation has forced the incumbent telecom operators to allow newcomers to provide the service they were refusing to provide themselves. Probably the most extreme example is that of France, where France Télécom refused to provide ADSL service in order to avoid competing with their profitable ADSL and T1 businesses.
Assuming Sprint's press release is accurate (which, based on previous juvenile behavior by Cogent, I'm inclined to believe them), Cogent has effectively cut themselves off from the Internet.
Put simply, they've put their AS onto the net without having the necessary routing arrangements in place. They are, at best, a kinda-sorta-maybe-if-you're-lucky part of the Internet right now. They want to be a transit provider without doing the messy stuff like getting contracts in place. Good luck with that.
If I were a Cogent customer and unable to connect to the other half of the internet... I would bail and connect with another company that pays their bills. Contract or not - Cogent wouldn't get a dime from me after this B.S.
Where are the angered masses?
Whose customers? The customers most affected are Cogent's customers, not Sprint's. If Sprint is to be believed, they have plenty of notice to Cogent before they disconnected them. But Cogent clearly failed to notify their customers, or make alternative arrangements.
Did you mean that Sprint should have notified Cogent's customers? How are they supposed to do that?
You usually end up as the red-headed step child when your competitors charge $50-100/Mb for connectivity and you charge $4.
If Cogent was your sole provider at this point, you'd either be an idiot or completely out of touch. This isn't the first time this has happened with Cogent. It isn't the second either. And it surely won't be the last.
Sprint doesn't get off so easy though. They pulled what amounts to a "sure, try it risk free for 3 months. Cancel if you don't like it, but if you fail to inform us in triplicate you owe us hundreds of thousands of dollars." That's a crock.
Nobody who initiates a settlement-free peering agreement intends to pay for a transit connection if the trial period doesn't work out. If there was a serious chance that Cogent could be convinced to buy service from Sprint, Sprint would never have agreed to peering since the two types of connection are mutually incompatible. And Sprint damn well knows it.
Then too, Sprint probably decided to block Cogent's routes from the rest of their peers. Otherwise I expect Cogent would simply have routed around the downed connections. That was a step too far, one which makes Sprint a dangerous selection as your sole carrier as well.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Two countries sharing a massive border. One has a highly regulated banking sector, one preaches deregulation.
One has a catastrophic banking failure leading to necessary "socialization" of corporate losses. The other has the most stable banking system in the first world.
Screaming "regulation is bad" without considering the situation is duckspeak, and no more intelligent than saying "anything socialist is bad" or "windows is always bad" just because it appears to be a popular viewpoint.
"Knowledge is the only instrument of production that is not subject to diminishing returns" -Journal of Political Econom
I would presume it was to allow Cogent to gracefully transition to other arrangements on their own, and then Sprint would physically disconnect the links once they were no longer in use.
Or in other words: to prevent something like this incident from occurring. Eventually they decided they'd given Cogent enough time and pulled the plug anyway. I suppose they were trying to strongarm Cogent, and Cogent played chicken by just null-routing Sprint. Since Sprint has now brought the link back up, I guess it means Cogent won this round -- obviously it was causing their customers too much inconvenience, proving Cogent's point that their traffic is actually valuable to Sprint.
It's still an asshole thing to do though.
Well, we don't know the terms of the agreement. Perhaps the agreement said that Cogent would either have to terminate the peering or pay for it.
The idea is that Sprint wants Cogent to get the blame. So they will say that Cogent forced them to cut the peering.
We'll only know the truth if the terms of the contract are made public (fat chance) or there's a lawsuit that puts these details in the public record.
FWIW, my position is that enforcing peering traffic volume makes perfect sense. Sprint should not peer settlement-free with my personal home web server. But enforcing ratios make no sense. Your customers pay you just as much to receive traffic as to send it. If your customers want to send more than they receive or receive more than they send, then you'll have to live with that.
From a business standpoint, it's idiotic for Sprint to try to pressure Cogent to compete with them.
Sprint was just [...] trying to find a way to work with Cogent
Baloney. These companies weren't unknown to each other. Everybody in this agreement understood perfectly well that the deal was for settlement-free peering and if it didn't work out it would be discontinued. There was never any intent to buy on Cogent's part nor did Sprint harbor any serious illusion that there was.
Cogent understood that when they failed to accept Sprint's paid peering offer, Sprint would cut them off at Sprint's pleasure.
Sprint drank their own koolaid with the idea that they can somehow unilaterally change the agreement and Cogent's inaction would constitute acceptance. It's the old penny-record scam where you get a record for a penny but then they send you another record at full price every week and you have to send each one back or pay for it.
Cogent figure that Sprint would try to pull this kind of stunt so they led Sprint right down the garden path, keeping connection alive outside of any contractual obligation to pay for it.
Both companies have behaved dishonorably here. I don't shed a tear for either one of them.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Actually socialism is always bad, in the long run.
So why exactly are the interstate highway system, the postal system, and your local fire department "always bad in the long run"?
I suspect that you've been marked as troll, not because of your opion, but because of your total failure to back it up.
What it comes down to is that there is this thing called "market failure". In cases of market failure it makes sense for the gov't to step in and solve the problem. This requires collective ownership of the resources necessary to solve the problem, AKA socialism.
Life is too short to proofread.
I bet most of the people here dissing Cogent are either working for the other Tier 1 players, or are just playing into their hands.
That's an awfully paranoid attitude. Assuming Sprint isn't lying outright, Cogent seem pretty clearly in the wrong, legally speaking. Whether those laws are morally just or not is another matter, and I'd agree with you that they aren't, but from the comments it seems like most people simply aren't aware of the Tier 1 monopoly attempts.
Seems to me the "commercial trial agreement" constitutes a "settlement free peering agreement." Now IANAL but I suspect that at the very least it would be necessary to prove that Cogent KNEW or should have known that the contractual conditions that would have turned the trial agreement into a longer term proposition did not occur.
In other words it seems to me that Cogent and sprint had a contract that said if X,Y and Z occur then we keep peering for free. Cogent may be disagreeing with sprint over whether X,Y and Z did occur.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
Let's assume that I am a B2B kind of guy. (I don't want to deal with "end users", I want to deal with businesses - Business 2 Business)
So I set up a high-end network. I'm going to carry massive amounts of data, and peer with existing "tier 1" providers to shuffle data with/for them. Let's just assume that I have significantly more bandwidth than Sprint or Cogent, and for this argument, I'll be a "tier 0" provider.
If I peered with Sprint/Cogent/ATT/XO in order to provide service to them, how would I get paid?
I mean, here I am, shuffling terabits of data every second for all these "tier 1" providers, at significant cost to my company. How do I not close doors as soon as my venture capital runs out?
Peering points are only "free" if the give and take for the connection is fairly equivalent. When it becomes 1-sided, the "free" cost has to balance somehow, or my company example above would fail despite providing significant value to the marketplace.
Currently, the "cost" of bandwidth is paid for by content providers, not content consumers. As a content provider, I pay nearly $1,000 per month for a 100 Mbit connection to the Internet in a high quality colo facility, at about 10 Mbit usage, while many people reading this can get a 10 Mbit connection for $40 or less.
And it has to be that bandwidth has to be 1-directional. See, if I'm a tier 0 provider, with no end-users to "pay the bill", and upload costs were equal to download costs, I wouldn't get paid for my service, even though I'm providing a valuable service. But by making the cost of bandwidth 1-directional, I can get paid for delivering a valuable service to the marketplace! The marketplace has to be 1-sided, otherwise you don't have a marketplace.
Don't worry, it's OK. The marketplace has to provide some means to operate, or it doesn't exist!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
"Why would Cogent have to disconnect from Sprint? Why wouldn't Sprint just turn down the links after the trial period?"
That's what they should have done. But they were afraid that Cogent will scream to the media and their customers that there was a settlement free contract in place and Sprint is breaking the Internet. Basically this is a high stakes version of a bad tenant that moved in to your rental and refused to pay its bills. If you throw them out and cut off their customers, it still ends up looking bad for you and you get a bunch of folks in the media and here in slashdot blaming Sprint for rupturing the Internet.
If Sprint is right and Cogent really lied about the existence of a settlement free peering arrangement to the media, the SEC should investigate them.
So "great service" == not telling your customers about the impending disconnection from Sprint that Cogent knew about for *months*?
"great service" == not coming up with any mitigation plan for the disconnection?
"great service" == releasing an early press-release that, upon first glance, appears to contain as many lies as it does half-truths?
This is quite a different definition than what i'm used to.
Sprint customers are buying access to sites on Cogent.
Nobody buys a Sprint or Cogent connection to get to Sprint or Cogent. They want the data from the content provider sites (pr0n and http://archive.org/ ).
Therefor Sprint is really profiting on people's desire to get to sites inside Cogent. If they cut off those sites people will drop them and get somebody else
who provides the access.
Think of it this way: I am an apartment complex and I have an agreement to mow my neighbor's lawn and in exchange he shovels my sidewalk. It uses approximately the same amount of work. Now imagine my neighbor and all of his agreements are bought by the local golf course. Now the golf course now expects me to mow the entire course because the agreement was that they would shovel and I would mow. Cogent was the golf course, I am an ISP.
That is how the big carriers see it, but it is pure nonsense! Network A has a server on it and network B has a client (browser). Each has been paid by their customer to provide internet service. If A is sending a bunch of data over the peering connection w/ B, it's because B's customers asked for it. If A and B stop talking, both carrier's customers are no longer getting the full connectivity they paid for.
The only part that makes any sense in the various peering squabbles is paying for the upkeep of the peering link and trying to keep things so that the aggregate of the routes is more or less at the midpoint so each is bearing equal cost for equal benefit.
Keep in mind, often enough, a peering is nothing more than a cat 5 from one rack to the next rack over and a few lines in a configuration file.
As far as dealings with Cogent, they and MANY other carriers have deeply screwed up accounting departments amongst other problems.
>>>It is Sprints obligation under those contracts to maintain routable connections to Cogent.
False. Sprint is under no obligation to maintain your contact to a non-paying customer - just as Bell Telephone is under no obligation to make-sure you can contact with your ne'er-do-well uncle who didn't pay his phone bill.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
Network A has a server on it and network B has a client (browser). Each has been paid by their customer to provide internet service.
Wrong.
Network A has a server, Network C has a client, and the two are connected together via Network B.
Now, Network A & C both were paid by their respective customers, but network B never got paid by anybody, unless A & C have a deal where they pay Network B to pass traffic.
Really, it is all a big mess. To really solve some of these peering issues, (& I hate to say it) but the government needs to get involved & either demand open peering while subsidizing the carriers, or just regulate & takeover a bunch of long-haul trunks.
Read the article. Sprint gave Cogent ample advance warning. Cogent did nothing to mitigate the problem. The way the article is written gives the impression that Cogent's only connection to the internet came through Sprint. At one point Sprint had 10 interconnects up with Cogents network. Over the course of close to two months they gradually reduced the number of interconnections with Cogent's full awareness of what was taking place.
Where is there any precident that Sprint has to maintain routes for their customers (or anyone else) to Cogent? Look at the phone system. If someone doesn't pay their phone bill, when you dial their number you are told, "This number is no longer in service." You paying your phone bill doesn't guarantee that you will be able to reach people who refuse to pay their bills. That is the exact same thing that happened here. Cogent refused to pay their phone bill and Sprint terminated their service.