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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.
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!
Cogent could have, at any time during this depeering, allowed the sprint bound traffic to route through one of their other peering points. This would have allowed their customers, including yourself, to continue to reach the entire internet even though it may have been slightly slower. It's the beauty of the internet, they could have easily routed the traffic elsewhere but they CHOSE to route sprint to a blackhole route.
Are they connected again? The traffic is flowing.
The Spacing Guild must have complained.
The spice must flow!
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.
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.
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.
Just like what happened with Level(3) a few years ago.
Cogent's history in the ISP market has been absolutely horrible. They came in to town as the Walmart of ISPs, investing in a huge new super-efficient backbone infrastructure doing everything it could to cut costs so they could offer insane deals to their customers. They were running 10Gigabit connections using existing fiber and brand new equipment. They had no 'legacy' hardware.
The hosting industry bit into the Cogent game when they had customers running multimedia sites that needed tons of bandwidth (see: porn) and were tired of paying insane rates per mbps when Cogent had this brand new network with tons of capacity.
But Cogent wasn't in the 'settlement free interconnect' game yet, they were paying for bandwidth themselves. So they went out and purchased a few ISPs that already had settlement free interconnects. The agreements are already in place, so it was a big win situation for them. But these agreements almost always come with the term that you must give as much as you receive (so you need to have a balance between hosted sites and end users.) Cogent didn't have end users, they had servers.
Think of it this way: I am an apartment complex and I have an agreement to mow my neighbor's lawn and in exchange he shovels my sidewalk. It uses approximately the same amount of work. Now imagine my neighbor and all of his agreements are bought by the local golf course. Now the golf course now expects me to mow the entire course because the agreement was that they would shovel and I would mow. Cogent was the golf course, I am an ISP.
Now in my apartment I house a bunch of golfers once I say "screw this, figure out your lawn situation yourself" the course says "ok, well, I guess your tenants are going to have to go without golf." What the hell am I to do now? Mow this golf course to keep my tenants happy?
Finally I come to an agreement, the golf course has to pay me a small amount and I will mow their grass. Everything seems OK, but then the golf course gets in to a bit of trouble and all of a sudden decides "OK, well... he doesn't want his tenants to go without golf so he will probably keep mowing our grass even if we stop paying him." Here we are again, I'm in an impossible situation because I really care about my tenants but man, I just cannot mow an entire golf course all by myself. So I send the golf course warnings after warnings, and after I reach a tipping point I just say "GFY, I'm not mowing your course anymore." I stop mowing it, and the golf course says "IT IS TOTALLY HIS FAULT THAT YOU CANNOT PLAY GOLF!!!"
Right now a lot of ISPs can hit Cogent's old pricing (and Cogent just cannot go any lower than they already are) so a lot if ISPs will just pass on Cogent and go for someone with a better record.
There is a lot more to the story that we don't know about, and since these agreements are generally done under a NDA we will never know for sure what exactly is happening at Cogent.
Just a FYI: I work for a hosting company that has had some dealings with Cogent in the past.