Slashdot Mirror
The Other Side of the Sprint Vs. Cogent Depeering
Swoolley writes "A month back this community discussed the Sprint vs. Cogent depeering. Now a story I wrote for Forbes.com tells the inside story of the fight, based on the lawsuits the two companies filed against each other in Virginia state court. For once, thanks to those suits, the public gets to see the details of a confidential peering agreement between two of the Internet's largest autonomous systems, as well as the circumstances leading up to the depeering. (Which company is in the right? Read the facts and decide for yourself.) While some people have argued that the depeering is reason for more government regulation, the Forbes story makes the case that details of the recent Cogent vs. Sprint fight argue for exactly the opposite: keeping the Internet backbones free of government meddling."
This is not the first time Cogent act like bandits.
http://gigaom.com/2008/03/18/cogent-ceo-peering-breakdown-is-telias-fault/
That's the key - Cogent was CLEARLY in the wrong. They agreed to a paid trial, which they failed. No contract existed for free, or really any kind of peering. Sprint kept the peering up with them anyway - for a YEAR without a contract, billing them for services just like they would any customer, and when Cogent refused to pay, Sprint did the right thing and gave them 30 days notice that they would de-peer them for failure to pay their bill - FOR A YEAR!!!
Sprint only made one HUGE mistake - they didn't understand what the impact to their wireless business would be, and they didn't notify customers as a result, according to my guy on the inside at Sprint.
But this is slashdot. A slashdoter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber!
why did traffic stop flowing?
Because both Sprint and Cogent are what's known as "transit-free" providers.
There are three types of connections:
Transit connections - where you pay someone to connect you to "the Internet"
Peering connections - where you swap traffic between your particular corner of the Internet and the other guy's corner of the Internet
Customer connections - where you are paid by someone to connect to "the Internet"
A transit-free provider has only the latter two connection types. They are (in theory) sufficiently well connected with peering links that they don't have to pay anyone for transit. In addition to Cogent, several of the big name providers including Verizon, AT&T and Qwest are also transit-free.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Shameless self promotion: This article at Ars Technica explains how peering and transit works. For some more info see my blog: Internet Thought.
Use Adsense for Charity
If you just put a pile of money out in the street, sure, nothing will change, but your analogies are just that. History and reality are better barometers of effective policy.
If the government employs people to improve infrastructure, it lowers the cost of doing business and benefits the whole economy, while evening out the down cycle when other businesses are cutting back. The biggest reasons western countries do well as economies are their workers and their infrastructure and their reliance on government technology and protectionism. While America unfortunately does not see the benefit of having a well educated populace, it does see the benefit of having a reliable power grid, sewage system, telecommunications network, etc. Some societies see single payer health care as part of infrastructure, which is the main reason it's cheaper to build a car in Canada than it is in Detroit.
(Here's an article that discusses two facts unknown to most Americans: our car companies employ more people in Ontario than Michigan, and they do it because of their more efficient health care system and the canadian dollar.)
In fact, the computer you're typing on and the internet it travels over are all due to government research. Do you imagine we would be less prosperous if China had been the ones who were licensing technology for us to manufacture instead of the other way around? Government is capable of doing good things, but not in the hands of those who attend to the needs of corporations instead of people.