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

[lysergic.acid]

um, no.

there's no on the behalf of anyone here. it takes 2 nodes to make a connection--a sender and a receiver. the sender may be on Sprints network while the receiver is on Cogent's network, or vice versa. it doesn't matter. but the connection is already paid for by both parties involved. the sender wants to send data, and the receiver wants to receive data. both Cogent and Sprint share a mutual interest here: to fulfill that request, thus rendering the service they were each paid to render for their respective customers.

if Sprint has a bigger network, then they also have more users initiating connections to Cogent than Cogent has users initiating connections to Sprint. so by that logic, Sprint should be paying Cogent for the "lopsided" balance. but neither Cogent nor Sprint are each other's customers. the users of their networks are their customers. the more users you have, the bigger your network, and the more you get paid. that's how it works. if Sprint is larger than they already get compensated for maintaining a larger network by their customers.

Re:Do we need regulation?

[dbrutus]

Actually socialism is always bad, in the long run. It's organized "robbing Peter to pay Paul" and look at the shiny May day parades with plenty of frictional loss due to loss of honest pricing signals and poor incentivization.

The free market can be a huge bitch, though and most every country out there has circuit breakers to tame it a bit including the US. The penalty is less growth and poorer long-term performance. The benefit is that panics aren't as destructive as in a completely unregulated system. The long term trend is to slip down the slope into more and more regulated situations, sacrificing progress for safety until you can barely manage stagnation.

So the preaching deregulation bit is merely an effort to swim upstream. It's laudable but you need to understand what it's really about. Nobody desires zero regulation. It's a straw man that socialists like to whack around a lot. The deregulators actually desire the least regulation while preserving system viability.

Re:Do we need regulation?

[NormalVisual]

Once again for the slow kids - you DON'T moderate something (-1, Troll) just because you don't agree with the poster.