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.

Comments

Re:Holy Shit

[Glendale2x]

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.

Re:Holy Shit

[Anonymous Coward]

How soon we forget:

http://ask.slashdot.org/askslashdot/05/10/05/2247207.shtml?tid=95

Small ISPs are the most vulnerable

[kaaona]

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.

Re:Small ISPs are the most vulnerable

[silas_moeckel]

You don't seem to understand how peering works. Pushing the Sprint conntent to any of there other peers would have violated there peering agreements and they would not have seen the routes from those peers anyway. The internet only works because all the teir 1's have statement free peering with all the other teir 1's (teir one being the engineering definition of not having any transit links not because the sales guy said so) Transit is when you pay somebody to take your traffic often you cant switch from transit to peering with the same company (if you want ot become a teir 1 you will probably have to pay a 3rd party for transit during the transition). On a peering session you normally only get routes from your peers network and people that are paying them for transit, this means you never get the full 250k or so routes from any one peer.

The tHing you have to realize is every other tier 1 hates cogent, they are one ones that figured out that bandwidth really does not have a high cost if you build out your network smartly. Reliability has it's costs but every carrier has there bad days some more than others. Cogent really only provides service where they can do it cheaply mostly major metro areas especially big shared office buildings. It's dirt cheap bandwidth if you can get it (think $400-1000 for a 100mb connection with no caps etc) and many business are willing to trade some reliability issues with cogent for paying less than there T1 for a pipe 66 times bigger. That being said your silly if cogent or sprint is your only provider.

As a side note this is one of the reasons to avoid tier 1 carriers they are fine if you have at least 2 of them but if you can only have one connection get a tier 2 thats paying 3 or more tier ones for bandwidth and has the capacity to loose any one carrier at any time. As a hint most tier one's have AS numbers below 3k.

Looks like it's back up

[BigPappa]

From what it looks like, the peering is back up. Internet Health Report

Cogent can pay any ISP they want

[billstewart]

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.

Not so fast.

[rpsoucy]

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.

Don't upset the Cartel

[slashkitty]

From wikipedia: "Tier 1 networks typically seek to protect their relatively rare status by preventing new networks from becoming Tier 1s and thus potentially competing. The networks often accomplish this by setting "peering requirements" which are intended to be too high for new networks to meet. Some experts in the field of Internet interconnections have compared the collective behaviors and motivations of Tier 1 networks to those of a cartel, in that they attempt to reduce competition in Internet bandwidth pricing through tacit collusion, and attempt to restrict the admission of new members. When one Tier 1 is perceived to be "cheating" the cartel by selling transit for too low a price, or by "dumping" too much outbound heavy bandwidth (which is significantly easier to deliver for the sending network than the receiving network), other members may move to de-peer that network."

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.

Small ISPs need multihoming anyway

[billstewart]

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.)