Peering Disputes Migrate To IPv6

1sockchuck writes "As more networks prepare for the transition to IPv6, we're seeing the first peering disputes (sometimes known as 'Internet partitions') involving IPv6 connectivity. The dispute involves Cogent, which has previously been involved in high-profile IPv4 peering spats with Sprint, Level 3 and Telia. Hurricane Electric, which has been an early adopter on IPv6, says Cogent won't peer with it over IPv6. Hurricane has extended an olive branch by baking a cake bearing a message of outreach for Cogent."

Comments

Oh great, Cogent is at it again

[mikael_j]

Anyone feel like taking bets on how long it will take until the other Tier 1 ISPs gang up on Cogent and just shut off their peering to Cogent?

Seriously, every one of these conflicts that Cogent gets involved in seems to involve Cogent acting like a bunch of dicks and the only people defending them are their most loyal customers and their employees, why are they even still in business?

/Mikael

Re:Oh great, Cogent is at it again

[Burdell]

Peering is generally only considered "fair" if there is a similar flow of traffic in each direction (averaged over a good period of time). Peering agreements are written with certain traffic ratios defined, and going outside those ratios terminates the agreement or triggers a payment clause. It appears that in every case, Cogent traffic had dropped outside of the contract ratios, and so they were asked to pay for service like anyone else (as it was no longer an equitable peering), and instead they threw a public tantrum and blamed everybody else.

The details are never made public, so when it happens once, you don't really know who is telling the truth. When it happens over and over again with one provider, as with Cogent, a picture begins to form. Cogent is a "tier-1" wanna-be, but don't have the traffic to back it up. They've been caught lying before, so at this point, they have no credibility.

Re:Oh great, Cogent is at it again

[dozer]

Back in the old days, whenever our peering ratio started getting wobbly, we'd just set up NNTP servers and have them hammer away (either downloading or uploading, depending on what direction we needed to move the balance).

I assume ISPs are still doing this but they're probably using BitTorrent now instead of NNTP.

I wouldn't peer with HE either....

[teknopurge]

They are the Wal-Mart of bandwidth and offer dirt-cheap prices. How can they do that and expect to hand-off to more expensive/higher quality(It's Cogent, I know....) networks? People want cheaper and cheaper so a company will eventually come along that caters to that crowd, but how dare they expect to offer the same QoS and not pay for it. Forget peering then throttling the links, Cogent is doing the right thing and not even lighting the fiber.

Re:I wouldn't peer with HE either....

[mea_culpa]

I don't know about this. I've used HE for various hosting needs for over a decade and they were never the 'Wal-mart' in their price and quality range. Using the big box store analogy, I'd rank them a Macy's.

Growing Trend...

[Monkeedude1212]

I haven't been with it long enough to know how often this kind of stuff goes on, but are Cake Gestures common in IT/IS/CT? Or only after the release of Portal? I recall IE sending a Cake to Firefox... Or Mozilla... Or something... (or vice versa, I don't really remember who congradulated who)...

It almost seems like they would send a cake hoping it'll get news'd somewhere so the public favours whoever is sending the cake.

Or maybe I'm just paranoid. The companion cube will do that to ya, you know.

Go peer with google instead

[Ant P.]

They've already bought loads of dark fibre, maybe they'd be interested in getting a controlling stake in IPv6 early on.

Re:Go peer with google instead

[dotwaffle]

Right, so you peer with Google, who have a fairly open peering policy. How does that solve you getting access to Cogent's customers? You expect Google to leak Cogent's routes to it's peers free of charge?

Could someone elaborate?

[spectre_240sx]

For those of us who don't have experience with how the big ISPs connect to each other, could someone shed some light on the situation? Does peering involve a physical connection or is it just down to advertising routes? I thought having your routes advertised was a good thing.

What happened to IPv5?

[NotQuiteReal]

If we are gonna skip numbers, why "6"?, sounds like the devil's work to me. They even use "hex" numbers in the dot notation... (which is 8 groups of 4 hex digits... so why not IPv8?)

I'm just sayin.