Slashdot Mirror
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.
They're unreachable due to no internet connection.
silly americans. you're about to elect a nigger president.
don't come running over here when your country burns!
"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.
Lousy product -> loosing customers -> loosing business
(at least when not @ Wallstreet)
Cogent press release: "Sprint [severed its Internet connection to Cogent] in violation of a contractual obligation to exchange traffic with Cogent on a settlement free peering basis."
FACT: At no time did Sprint and Cogent enter into a contract for settlement free peering. In 2006, Sprint and Cogent formed a commercial trial agreement that ended in September 2007. Cogent was unable to satisfy the agreed-upon traffic exchange criteria within the trial agreement, yet refused to pay Sprint or disconnect from Sprint's network.
If what Sprint says is true, Cogent has just dug itself a hole and not just in the court room.
Either there was a settlement free peering contract in place, or there wasn't.
Cogent can spin all it wants, but they aren't actually supposed to lie in a press release.
Cogent's press release would definitely constitute a material statement, which means they could be hearing from the SEC for lying to the public and investors.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Whatever.
There's something seriously wrong in a world in which any ISP is allowed to break connectivity for millions of customers without being taken to court for it.
Do we need regulation? As in, if you de-peer without giving 45 days advance notice to your customers and allowing them to cancel their contract at no cost during those 45 days, you get sued into oblivion?
If either company is advertising "internet connectivity" services, they are guilty of false advertising.
National and local advertising boards should prohibit them from advertising "internet" services without a clear disclaimer that they do not in fact connect to the entire Internet.
That should shame both companies into solving their problems.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
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.
Seriously, they are *notorious* for this kind of bullshit. How many bridges do they have left to burn? Not many, I would think. I think they've pissed off all the Tier 1 and Tier 2 providers at this point.
Screw them.
http://internetpulse.net/ .. Are they connected again? The traffic is flowing.
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
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.
Without dirt cheap Cogent bandwidth, how will we get our porn?
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?
It seems pretty clear that - love or hate them - Sprint is acting quite reasonably and in accordance with the agreement between the two. Cogent sounds like a bunch of assholes to me.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Sprint Cuts Cogent Off the Internet 404 comments
Does that mean that /. is using Cogent now?
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
Sprint Cuts Cogent Off the Internet 404 comments
Trolling is a art,
The summary misses a key point: Sprint has restored its connection to Cogent, meaning the two companies can pursue their lawsuit and grievances without using customers as bargaining chips.
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
Well, I ... ... welcome ... ... ..... overlords!
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
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?
Unlike Cogent, who were big enough to get a trial arrangement for free peering with Sprint by asking for it, my web site / hosting service is somewhat smaller (specifically, it's the spare P266 laptop sitting under the desk behind some junk.) But really, I'm just as important to Sprint, because even though I'm not carrying 17% of the US Internet traffic, I also will have a much better traffic ratio - they'll be able to send 3:1 traffic to me, as opposed to Cogent sending them 3:1 or whatever, so clearly it's a good deal for them to offload traffic onto my server for free!
So I hope your regulations will support me in my Qwest to have Sprint give me lots of free bandwidth! And you'll have the support of all of Sprint's customers, who'll want to get the right to cancel at any time if Sprint doesn't give my web hosting service free bandwidth!
Ok, having said all that, if there were regulation like you're proposing for disconnecting free peering, we'd suddenly see big ISPs being unwilling to take on new free peering arrangements because they wouldn't want to get locked into unsuccessful ones by your regulations. On the other hand, the ISPs for whom free peering does make economic sense might start selling each other service for $1 or 1 Euro per month, cancellable at any time.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
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
The Sprint statement has been updated to announce that they have reconnected with Cogent.
Renesys blog has more details :
http://www.renesys.com/blog/2008/11/sprint-and-cogent-repeerfor-no.shtml
It may help people to think of it on a personal level: So suppose you and I are neighbors. I have a nice business class cable connection, you have a nice business class DSL connection. Now turns out we do a lot of traffic between each other, which doesn't go particularly fast since it goes over the net but also since it turns out our connections are routed very differently and have a lot if hops to get to each other. So being geeks, we decide to fix this by peering our networks. We connect up a Cat-5 connection between our houses and set up routers to handle things. What's more, we share each other's net. So traffic goes out the connection based on who's got the shortest route. Also if one connection goes out, we use the other one exclusively till it comes back up.
Now we don't charge each other for this service. We both pay our own costs. I pay for my line, you pay for yours and so on. Hence we are peers. The reason we do this is we both benefit equally form the relationship.
Ok so then another neighbor finds out about this. He's on dialup and would like something better. We say sure you can join our network, but you have to pay. Why? Well he isn't providing us any value. He's just going to cancel his dialup and use our network. That's great, but he's got to help with the costs. Also, he doesn't have anything we want, we aren't going to be accessing his files, so there is no peer situation. We sell him access.
In the case of Cogent it would be like a 4th neighbor. He asks to peer. He says he's got a wireless connection to a great provider, plus lots of stuff we'd want. So we decide to let him on as a peer. However, it turns out to be false. His link is slow and high latency, so we end up just using ours. Further he just uses our connections, since they are better for everything. Finally, we find little data from him we want. So we tell him "Know what? You can pay us to stay on our network, but we aren't letting you peer because we don't get anything out of it."
The idea of peering is just that: You connect to your peers, you equals. Those networks that have data you want, and you have data they want. Since it is an equal agreement, both sides bear their own costs. In unequal agreements, like you purchasing a connection from your ISP, then you have to pay.
Having only one provider is just asking for trouble. On any reasonably large scale, it isn't hard to get multiple providers either. Heck, you can even do it at home if you really want. It'll take a bit of trickery and might not gain you a whole lot, but you can have DSL and cable, and use both.
As for ISPs, it is really a requirement. You never know what will happen to your upstream providers. For example I work at a university and for a long time we only had one Internet connection. We had some various other connections (like to other universities) but only one actual connection to the net. No problem, we thought, we liked the provider, they liked us, etc. Ya well they weren't so competent as we might have hoped. One day due to some various shit, they lost all their router configs. Yes, really. As a result we went dark. No Internet access. This was, as they say, a rather big fuckup.
Now we have two providers, both of whom have connections to multiple other providers. Much harder for a single failure to take us offline. Our primary provider really could meet all our needs in terms of bandwidth and such quite easily. That's not the point. The point is we don't want to go dark again because someone screwed up.
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.
If you get both sprint and cogent your tubes will never die.
---
Actually, I'm not that clever.
This isn't about Sprint charging Cogent for the 3-month trial; it's about Cogent freeloading for nearly a year AFTER the trial expired despite repeated warnings of a disconnection.
That's one of the better explanations I've heard.
These free loading companies really do offer cheaper service because they are stealing bandwidth. Slashkitty is essentially arguing that it's cheaper to buy a car from a car thief and technically he's right because I can probably buy a nice car for 1/4th the price if I buy it from a thug who just stole the car. What's actually happening is that he's just rationalizing immoral and illegal behavior and justifying it under the banner of the little guy getting something back from the evil corporations.
It's the same crazy logic with all the people in these threads arguing that any little network should be able to peer for free with any Tier 1. It's the crazy logic that if I rented a little rack space at a peering hotel for $200 a month, I should be able to tap in to all the tier 1 providers with my Gigabit Ethernet Interface and be equals with all the other tier 1 providers. What these people are really doing is that they're rationalizing theft.
It's what your network does, over all. A datacentre still pays for all their bandwidth. It isn't a situation of "consumers pay, providers don't." What it comes down to is if it is more advantageous to trade with someone, rather than both of you going through a third party. Remember you can peer on any level. My neighborhood peering thing could be a reality, if people wanted to do so. As a practical matter I work for a university and we do peer with some institutions.
Basically it's a situation of how much data you need to get to and from network X, and how much it costs you and them to do so. If you are both going through another company, especially if you both have to pay that company, it may be in your best interests to peer your networks. However peering isn't free, you are paying for equipment and space and rights of way and such so that you can hook your networks together. So this is only worth it if the sharing is on equal ground. If it turns out that it isn't, well then maybe one side needs to pay.
Part of the equality thing isn't just direction of traffic, it is destination. If we peer our connections, as in my example, and 95% of the traffic you get from me is stuff on my network, well that's a useful peer to me. I cut down on my traffic to other networks, and you do the same. However if 95% of the traffic is in fact destined for other networks, then you are leeching off me, and should be paying. It isn't a useful peer if what you are doing is using that link just to get to other places. That just loads down my other links.
So that's how it works. The big networks peer with each other because they all have a lot of traffic that needs to flow to each other. It would be silly for AT&T to send all traffic for Sprint through Level 3, rather they just connect themselves and do it direct. The same thing can be true of smaller peers. Company A and Company B realize they do a lot of traffic, and thus setup a little peer network so they aren't loading up their Internet connections. However that only works when it is an equal share situation. If Sprint were to use AT&T's links mainly to contact other networks (especially large networks), AT&T would want to start charging for the links. Same deal if Company B jsut starts using the link to use Company A's bandwidth.
Yeah... but what has golf got to do with cars? You got the analogy wrong.
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.
It's about Cogent trying to leech for free AND Sprint trying to unilaterally change a contract (which they have no right to do) instead of simply ending it (which they do have a right to do.) Both companies have misbehaved.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Looking at what happened, Sprint did not unilaterally change the contract. The contract was for a period of 3 months, and then they offered a NEW contract to Cogent. Cogent did not depeer, and after a year, Sprint cut them off. Since Cogent did not wish to revise the contract, they should have disconnected that trunk. Also, if Cogent is routing Sprint packets to the bitbucket instead of through other channels, who does that make being the misbehaving party in this.
That which is done from love exists beyond good and evil
There should have been a car somewhere in that analogy.. besides that, it's a good one.
Or at least a golf cart anyway.
peering != freeloading.
peering == The Internet.
peering with settlement fees == might means right.
settlement fees for peering is just bullying.
sprint peering with cogent is from an engineering perspective an efficiency. The only reason for money to change hands is if one party has enough power to force the other to pay them.
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.
A contract offer not accepted is rejected. Sprint chose to keep Cogent connected without a contract, allegedly in the hope of negotiating a paid transit agreement. Fine, but that was Sprint's decision; it's not binding on Cogent. It isn't as if Cogent said, "Well, lets keep it running while we talk about an appropriate monetary agreement." Cogent steadfastly refused to accept anything other than settlement-free peering.
Also, bear in mind that Sprint is trying to double-dip. Settlement-free peering means that I agree to accept packets from you because the only packets you'll send me are addressed to one of my customers who has already paid me to receive those packets. Likewise, I'll send you packets which you tell me that someone has already paid you to receive.
Sprint wants to collect money twice for the same packet: both from their subscribers and from Cogent.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Having been in the business (Tier 1 and Tier2 ISP's, backbone routing ect...), About 8 or 9 years back, the "peer war" really took off. Who should be paying for what and the "I'm bigger than you, pay me" attitude. Several Tier 1, Tier 2 and about every Tier 3 wanted to start negotiations on basing economical (or practically next to nothing) peering based on capacity and quantity in the "lets all work together to balance traffic patterns out" based on that criteria. Problem was as a Tier 3 grew and more capacity and quantity were added they were working the way up the ladder. This never sat well with the Sprint, the newly formed Worldcom, ATT and several others basically because the smaller ISP's could undercut costs and as a responsible AS you really should have redundant backward links based on your daily traffic (trust me, there were some REAL humdingers out there). Anyway, the war of the network's still rages on between the smaller ISP's (presumably Cogent although the stat's really aren't showing that)and the larger one's(Sprint, IMO is not all that and a bag of chips.) I started in the business around 1994, and all this time we thought the companies would at least get together on certain things like peering with out all the fuss and at least come to terms with recieving and sending of traffic with out isolating some mom and pop organization which by some posts has happened. If Cogent has more traffic, then they should pay more in consideration. If they have less than Sprint can't hold them to already agreed on fee's. I would assume that if Cogent got behind than ANY check in the mail to Sprint would have avoided client interruptions and they could have sat down and worked something out. (I'm sure Sprint would have settled if Cogent had explained the situation) I would have to blame Cogent more than Sprint in this deal because the "resonsibility" factor to Cogent's clients. This is a war that will never be won, the losers will always be the small co-lo and ISP and home customers. .....and the convergence goes on....
No, Sprint was fearing for Cogent's customers and they feared Cogent would break the connection in a bad way by allowing the packets to go in to a black hole. That's exactly what they did and your argument is just plain nonsense. Sprint kept the free connection without a contract in good faith hoping to resolve the situation without affecting any customers.
Internet is a mixure of settlement and settlement-free peering arrangements. Every tier 1 provider that gets free peering has an obligation to maintain and upgrade the backbone of the Internet which is costly. We can't have tier 1 providers free loading because that means customers who aren't free loading have to pick up the slack. The best explanation of peering is here http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1015917&cid=25608479.
It's not the upkeep of the peering link that's an issue. It's how much of the work of toting the packets is done by each network. If one has the long haul and the other doesn't the one without the long haul expense needs should be helping the one without (at least with credit for doing some long hauling for them.) And if there's three or more ISPs in the path the ones in the middle are toting packets for the customers on the ends and need some revenue for that from the guys with customers to bill.
But IMHO some of the ISPs are using a broken metric to see if they're coming out on the short end. If this is such a case, perhaps Sprint thinks Cogent is freeloading when in fact it's not.
As I posted last time this came up:
I'm not sure what metric Sprint uses to decide that Cogent is getting the better part of the deal. But one of the companies in a previous Cogent dispute was upset that far more packets crossing the peering points originated at Cogent than on their net.
IMHO that metric is nuts. For instance: When a user on network A connects to a stream server on network B, virtually all the packets "originate" on network B. Is this a "service" for the customer on network A or the server on network B? Why should network B be expected to pay network A for the bandwidth whose use is initiated by network A's customer?
My answer: The connection is a service to BOTH customers.
Now it may make sense for one network to bill another if most of the transport expense is borne by one of them. For instance: If network A is a long-distance backbone and network B is a municipal island. And it would certainly make sense for a network serving as a middle-man transport between the networks that have the customers to expect payment (or some other reciprocal service) from BOTH of the customers' network. But (unlike the initiation of a phone call) the "from" address of a packet does NOT inherently assign more "blame" for the transport than the "to" address.
--
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Sprint probably decided to block Cogent's routes from the rest of their peers.
Correction: this was in fact not the case. Cogent made a choice not to try to pay anybody to connect them to Sprint. Their position was that since Sprint's customers paid Sprint to connect to Cogent as much as Cogent's customers paid Cogent to connect to Sprint, they shouldn't have to pay anybody to make that connection. Sprint made no attempt to prevent Cogent from connecting via another ISP.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
As for the phone situation, while caller is responsible has been enshrined into various agreements, it was always bogus there as well (again, both caller and recipient pay their respective providers).
"Initiator is responsible" makes SOME sense for connection-oriented communication. Especially on toll calling, where anybody can initiate but the receiver has essentially no idea who is calling until the connection is made. (That might be applicable to SOME internet traffic. For instance: You don't want to bill the victim for a DDoS attack. B-) )
But trying to extent that logic to the individual packets, regardless of protocol, just doesn't wash. Even in those network protocols where the concept of a connection exists and the initiator of a connection is the decision maker and primary beneficiary of the communication, that logic applies only to the connection itself.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Actually, as anyone who has dealt with Sprint knows: Cognet had more than likely been trying to cancel their service with Sprint, but Sprint kept sending them bills.
By definition, if Sprint and Level 3, both of which other Tier 1 providers consider to be Tier 1 providers, consider Cogent (ie the old PSI network) to not be a Tier 1 provider, then Cogent is not a Tier 1 provider.
Ever heard of the concept of a free market? Hint: it's not related to old boy networks and the rule of cartels.
Cogent is doing the right thing in trying to break up the logjam that is holding back US networking compared to many other countries that let their providers compete.
The fact that the old boys in the US are trying to squash Cogent is no surprise, but it shouldn't be defended either just because "that's the way it is", as you are doing. The way it is currently is costly and anticompetitive, and just plain bad for the country.
I'd say the only regulation that would make sense WRT peering is to bring in one simple rule:
Any provider who sells Internet connectivity to end-users (individuals, companies, data centers) must divest themselves of any backbone business, and vice-versa. If we're going to "tier" the providers, then the top tier (transit providers) must only offer transit links to those selling the actual end-user connectivity. IE: providers must choose to be "wholesalers" or "retailers" and may not be both.
Or...
Any provider selling end-user connectivity must peer at no charge to any other provider selling the same.
(Note - just tossing out ideas here. I doubt either of those would be practical, but we have to start someplace.)
The elephant in the room right now is that a small group of Tier 1 providers have effectively formed a cartel that restrains trade in Internet bandwidth. Those in "the club" gain a huge cost savings over those forced to buy transit links, which are identical to the free peering links they provide each other.
In no other industry would such behavior be allowed.
The idea is to encourage new players to enter the market. More competition benefits the end customers, whereas a few large providers tend to act like a de-facto monopoly.
Cogent customers are buying access to users on Sprint.
Nobody buys a Sprint or Cogent connection to get to Sprint or Cogent. They want the page views from the end users.
Therefore Cogent is really profiting on Sprint's customers desire to get to sites inside Cogent. If they get cut off those users, sites will drop them and get somebody else who provides the access.
What is really the benefit of "free" peering?
I see that if you peer you are still monitoring the amount of traffic flowing back and forth, so no technical (cost) savings over payed routing over another network.
And charging each other costs that equal each other out is not such a big effort in the age of computers. But charging each other makes live easier and takes out any motivation to bend the rules in order to get an advantage.
What is the real benefit of "free" peering after all?
Busy helping non technical users of OpenOffice.org - http://plan-b-for-openoffice.org/
The fine print says: "Lying to share holders is a crime, lying to customers is called permissible marketing and advertising (protected under the first amendment of free speech)."