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."

Comments

TFA paints a more even picture

[Nick Ives]

Cogent argue that under the terms of the contract they passed. They kept the link open at their end because as far as they were concerned they had passed and Sprint was simply following its end of the bargain. They're arguing that they don't have to pay because if Sprint really didn't think they had passed, they could have severed the link at their end.

The confusion is because both sides measured the performance in different ways. From Sprints' complaint:

Cogent unreasonably claimed that the amount of interconnection traffic satisfied the
utilization threshold requirement in the Trial Agreement because the port utilization peak figures
for each of the ten ports (used to calculate billing) exceeded the average utilization criteria across
all ports. Cogent ignored that Paragraph 5.E. required a sustained threshold average utilization
across all ports for the entire period, and instead focused on snapshot figures based on the
commercial pricing model of peak usage. As a result, Cogent argued that it was entitled to
settlement-free peering with Sprint.

I find it hard to believe that Cogent walked away from negotiations with the wrong idea about how the test was going to be measured. In any business negotiations both sides go to great pains to make sure everyone understands what's being agreed because otherwise it winds up in court like this. If the judge takes the view that Cogent was mislead (deliberate or not) then this becomes a big PITA for Sprint.

So yea, a balls-up for both parties.