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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.
They're unreachable due to no internet connection.
"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.
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!
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!
http://internetpulse.net/ .. Are they connected again? The traffic is flowing.
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
Um, how do you connect to the Entire internet? Can you define the internet? (hint, its not a series of tubes). Nobody could ever list that in a contract. I might have connections to L3, att, and cogent, but I can't guarantee that your packet will get through a backbone provider to a server in India. I couldn't even guarantee that the other companies I have connections to will constantly be working, and routing packets..
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
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.
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.
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?
Whose customers? The customers most affected are Cogent's customers, not Sprint's. If Sprint is to be believed, they have plenty of notice to Cogent before they disconnected them. But Cogent clearly failed to notify their customers, or make alternative arrangements.
Did you mean that Sprint should have notified Cogent's customers? How are they supposed to do that?
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
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.
Settlement free peering usually means both parties exchange roughly equal amounts of data. If it's lopsided one way or the other, then they wouldn't qualify in the traditional sense.
this is my sig
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.
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
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.
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
Well, we don't know the terms of the agreement. Perhaps the agreement said that Cogent would either have to terminate the peering or pay for it.
The idea is that Sprint wants Cogent to get the blame. So they will say that Cogent forced them to cut the peering.
We'll only know the truth if the terms of the contract are made public (fat chance) or there's a lawsuit that puts these details in the public record.
FWIW, my position is that enforcing peering traffic volume makes perfect sense. Sprint should not peer settlement-free with my personal home web server. But enforcing ratios make no sense. Your customers pay you just as much to receive traffic as to send it. If your customers want to send more than they receive or receive more than they send, then you'll have to live with that.
From a business standpoint, it's idiotic for Sprint to try to pressure Cogent to compete with them.
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.
Actually socialism is always bad, in the long run.
So why exactly are the interstate highway system, the postal system, and your local fire department "always bad in the long run"?
I suspect that you've been marked as troll, not because of your opion, but because of your total failure to back it up.
What it comes down to is that there is this thing called "market failure". In cases of market failure it makes sense for the gov't to step in and solve the problem. This requires collective ownership of the resources necessary to solve the problem, AKA socialism.
Life is too short to proofread.
You've officially missed the point of the settlement-free peering trial. As mentioned in TFA, it is only beneficial to both parties in a settlement-free peering agreement if the amount of traffic passed between the two networks is almost equal.
After 3 months, the traffic from Cogent wasn't as much as Cogent claimed it would be, and Sprint opted not to continue with the creation of a real settlement-free peering contract.
Nobody pulled out of anything, Cogent claimed their network passed more traffic than it really did and Sprint had no motivation to let them leech for free.
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.
"Why would Cogent have to disconnect from Sprint? Why wouldn't Sprint just turn down the links after the trial period?"
That's what they should have done. But they were afraid that Cogent will scream to the media and their customers that there was a settlement free contract in place and Sprint is breaking the Internet. Basically this is a high stakes version of a bad tenant that moved in to your rental and refused to pay its bills. If you throw them out and cut off their customers, it still ends up looking bad for you and you get a bunch of folks in the media and here in slashdot blaming Sprint for rupturing the Internet.
If Sprint is right and Cogent really lied about the existence of a settlement free peering arrangement to the media, the SEC should investigate them.
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.
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.
There should have been a car somewhere in that analogy.. besides that, it's a good one.
Or at least a golf cart anyway.
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.