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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.
Is anyone actually surprised that Cogent is being dicks again? I'm going to believe Sprint's side of the story because: 1) they don't get into peering fights every other month, 2) they don't release nasty press releases about their former peer, and 3) they don't route traffic for their former peer into a black hole and blame someone else. If you or I didn't pay our bills, we'd be nuked *way* faster than Sprint is saying they gave Cogent. The length of time is probably because Sprint knows that Cogent would be assholes about it and that it would break traffic in a bad way.
So many people from the previous thread put all the blame on Sprint because of that horrible press release Cogent had ready the second the last circuit was turned off. Did they all forget that this is Cogent the king of depeering bitch fights that we're talking about? They always cry foul and scream about it every time they get depeered.
this is my sig
How soon we forget:
http://ask.slashdot.org/askslashdot/05/10/05/2247207.shtml?tid=95
My ISP gets its connectivity from Cogent. As their customer I can connect to anywhere in the Internet EXCEPT those portions served by Sprint. Because of this corporate disagreement, I am cut off from my e-mail and from my Red Hat Network updates.
I agree with klapaucjusz (1167407) who perceptively asked if we needed regulation at the top carrier level. I agree, and plan to file a complaint with the FCC in the morning.
If you think the problem is bad, just wait until we've fixed it! (attributed to somebody or other). Think back, carefully. What proposed legislation has ever fixed an extant problem without making something else, and usually the original problem, worse?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Yeah but until they update there's a lot of customers using sprint as their ISP that can't get to some important cogent sites.
At work today I had several customers call in because they couldn't get to websites. One person used their wireless card to do online classes for school but their school was using cogent for their ISP, guess what they haven't been able to access since friday.
From what it looks like, the peering is back up. Internet Health Report
Sprint's press release speaks several times of a trial peering arrangement, each time asserting "that Cogent did not meet the minimum traffic exchange criteria agreed to by both parties." Okay, what it comes down to is What were those criteria? Sprint alleges they weren't met. But if they were, was that sufficient to move from the trial peering contract to a full peering contract?
Cogent moves a lot of data. They're certainly a peer to Sprint in that sense. And peering between the largest players - which these days includes Cogent - has always been free.
We know Cogent's competitors hate them because they're charging a fair price, rather than a ridiculously inflated one, for bandwidth. Sprint is the latest of them to try to freeze Cogent out - to eject them from the oligopoly.
So what where the criteria? Were they vague enough that Cogent could view the peering contract as binding, while Sprint thinks they have an out? That will probably require settlement in court. Meanwhile, only a fool would take Sprint at their word that the "criteria weren't met" - short of Sprint sharing the contract and the data with us.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
why should Cogent have to pay Sprint for peering instead of the other way around?
the internet is only useful to everyone when it is a single contiguous network. if it's just hundreds of small patches of connected networks it's absolutely useless to everyone.
Sprint and Cogent already have their customers which produce their revenue stream. peering their networks is mutually beneficial since it increases connectivity and allows traffic to be routed between the two networks more efficiently.
seems like Sprint is trying to double dip here. they're already being paid for providing internet access to their customers. Cogent's customers have done the same. website owners have paid for their web hosting. broadband users have paid for their broadband access. now if a Cogent customer wants to access a site on Sprint's network, he should be able to get that data since the connection is paid for. and vice versa for a Sprint customer trying to access a site hosted on Cogent's network.
granted, if you own a larger network, you can extort smaller networks (and all of their customers) for money. but that makes Sprint the asshole, not Cogent. claiming that Cogent is in the wrong just because they've been de-peered in the past without actually examining the details of the conflict to see whether Sprint's claims make any sense is rather naive. this isn't like high school where one's merits are based on their popularity. getting picked on often doesn't automatically make you wrong.
It's my understanding that the reason that the connections are unbalanced (ie. more traffic flow coming from cogent) is that a major slice of internet porn is hosted on Cogent (due to the low rates). The major telecoms, that host both business and residential customers, have a more balanced traffic pattern. This tight grip they have on two sides of the equation allow them to charge higher rates.
As Sprint and others slowly find out, cogent hosts a significant portion of the internet, and they must connect to cogent as part of their connection to "the Internet".
It might be better if cogent bought or was acquired by a residential ISP to balance things out more.
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
The AC who posted Article #25607411 misses the point that Sprint customers can't reach Cogent customers and vice versa unless somebody connects some routes. Users of other ISPs are fine, and small ISPs that have Sprint as an upstream are likely to multihome to multiple upstream carriers for reliability, so they're ok. The two main parties that are affected are Sprint wireless customers and hosting companies that only use Cogent (a fairly large market, because Cogent's per-megabit charges are cheap), and Sprint thinks the latter are more likely to pressure Cogent into fixing it.
From Sprint's perspective, Cogent can buy transit from almost any ISP they want and that'll fix the problem. Sprint could also buy transit from somebody connected to Cogent, but Tier 1 carriers have ego problems about this, and of course if Sprint were willing to do that they'd have been willing to continue free peering with Cogent as well.
Sprint wireless users can also tunnel through various tunnel servers to get to non-Sprint parts of the net. Possibly "Google Secure Access" will work (it's free, intended for users of Google's Wifi services, but may be more generally usable), and there's the Tor Anonymity Network.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Cogent is a Tier 1 network service provider (weather or not Sprint and L3 want it to be).
Cogent offers great service at an unbeatable price (4-5 USD per Mbps as opposed to the 15-20 or so Sprint and competitors are charging).
How does Cogent do this? They focused early on metro ethernet services and wave division, instead of wasting money in legacy technologies. They kept their vision clear, and their staff small (under 500 employees).
Cogent is the type of NSP we want as a Tier 1. A very strong backer of Net Neutrality, and no intention of trying to get into the entertainment business unlike Verizon, AT&T, etc. Cogent has a goal of offering the best service at the lowest price (the end result being realistically moving the US forward in terms of available bandwidth).
If you take a look at the CAIDA rankings [http://as-rank.caida.org/], you'll see that Cogent has surpassed Verizon Business (was UUNET) and Global Crossing, and is now right behind Sprint.
Cogent is growing, and if Sprint doesn't do something they're going to loose their no. 3 spot to them. So their strategy is to make a power play and force Cogent into a Tier 2 spot and create uncertainty in the eyes of current and potential customers.
As much as Sprint would like to position itself as a provider for Cogent, it's not. Sprint is a peer for Cogent with Cogent being an equivalent size of the current Sprint network, and larger than many of Sprints other peers.
The idea that Sprint doesn't get as much out of peering with Cogent as Cogent does peering with Sprint is absurd and PR propaganda to try and look like this was anything other than a power-play to keep a competitor at bay.
It will be interesting to see how this goes in court. If I were a Sprint customer I would seriously consider moving to Cogent.
On a side note, Sprint is one of the major opponents against Net Neutrality. Combine that with the fact that Cogent is offering the same level of service for a third the cost, and it's not hard to see why Sprint is trying to take Cogent out of the picture.
Sprint and the others hope that the disruptive Cogent would disappear and seem to try to put them down every (legal) chance they get. Cogent tries to make some noise and even the playing field with by going against the telecoms.
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.
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
Sprint's press release mentions the following:
"Despite this fact, and after repeated discussions, Cogent failed to disconnect itself from the Sprint network or compensate Sprint for the ongoing connection."
Why would Cogent have to disconnect from Sprint? Why wouldn't Sprint just turn down the links after the trial period?
If your ISP is only getting its connectivity from Cogent, and isn't homed to multiple upstream ISPs, then they're at risk from any technical problems their Cogent link has as well as from any business problems Cogent has. If they need any regulatory help from the FCC, it's a requirement for Sprint to give them free Clues, not for Sprint to give Cogent free connectivity.
The Internet's a lot more stable than when I got involved with it 25ish years ago, or when small ISPs were a dime a dozen a decade and a bit ago, but it's still not 100% perfect. Back in the mid-90s, small ISPs provided dialup and email service, and they usually bought their first upstream T1 line from the cheapest provider available, but if they stayed up and running for a few months and started to fill it up, they almost universally bought their next upstream T1 from a different provider, because Internet routing flapped all the time, and if you had two providers you were not only less susceptible to your connection failing, you were much less likely to lose connection to half the world whenever a butterfly flapped its wings near MAE-WEST. In fact most ISPs these days can give you a reasonable service level agreement and also a reasonable level of service, but your ISP needs some sort of redundant connection.
Of course, if you think this is a mess, just look at the shape the IPv6 world is in - randomly-connected archipelagos of random little islands, tunnelled together by a maze of twisty little passages.
(Disclaimer: I work for an ISP that's not part of this dispute, but this is entirely my own opinion, not theirs.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Yes, it appears that Sprint finally got tired of Cogent's unwillingness to pay for connection and disconnected them after giving Cogent more than adequate notice.
The problem is that Sprint gave THEIR OWN CUSTOMERS zero notice that they were going to kill their access to a fair chunk of the internet by de-peering Cogent.
The bosses and bean counters at Sprint were only looking at the business case between the two carriers, NOT at the services they would severely affect for their customers.
I suspect that is why Sprint has "temporarily" re-connected directly to Cogent again...
--
Tomas
This sort of thing actually seems to go back to the 19th century. After the Treaty of Bern in 1874, mail was exchanged with something like settlement free peering agreements. Apparently this worked for a long time, back when people actually wrote to each other and a letter sent in one direction was likely to result in one sent back the other way.
The system broke down when commercial mail and magazines and such started accounting for more of the volume, and some countries were having to receive (and deliver) much more mail than they sent. In 1969 the system was changed, and now there's a much more complicated inter-country billing system in place.
How is offering an alternative 'unilaterally converting' anything?
The part were Sprint sues Cogent for non-payment on the never-accepted alternative.
But your Sprint/Cogent dialog is pretty much on target.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.