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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!
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.
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?
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
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.