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The Other Side of the Sprint Vs. Cogent Depeering
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Dec 02, 2008 04:18 PM
from the working-it-out dept.
from the working-it-out dept.
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."
Related Stories
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Sprint Cuts Cogent Off the Internet 413 comments
superbus1929 writes "I work as a security analyst at an internet security company. While troubleshooting an issue, we learned why our customer couldn't keep his site-to-site VPN going from any location that uses Sprint as its ISP: Sprint has decided not to route traffic to Cogent due to litigation. This has a chilling effect; already, this person I worked with cannot communicate between a few sites of his, and since Sprint is stopping the connections cold (my traceroutes showed as complete, and not as timing out), it means that there is no backup plan; anyone going to Cogent from a Sprint ISP is crap out of luck."
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Behind the Cogent-Sprint Depeering 325 comments
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.
Submission: Inside the Sprint vs. Cogent depeering fight by Anonymous Coward
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Well, DUH! (Score:2, Funny)
This is Forbes, after all. According to Forbes, the Great Depression was proof of the need for less government regulation.
Actually, it was (Score:2, Informative)
Mod parent up (Score:3, Insightful)
You can't spend your way out of a bad economic cycle; that's like drinking more beer as a solution to a hangover.
That's a great analogy! You might be able to drink away a hangover, but it's just going to result in a worse hangover later.
Re:Mod parent up (Score:5, Funny)
I find smoking pot to be a much better treatment for an alcohol induced hangover. How this relates to the GPs analogy is not immediately clear.
Parent
Re:Mod parent up (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Mod parent up (Score:5, Funny)
You might be able to drink away a hangover, but it's just going to result in a worse hangover later.
Not necessarily. [wikipedia.org]
I'm not saying it's better than a hangover, but at least you can honestly say it isn't a hangover.
Parent
Re:Actually, it was (Score:4, Insightful)
Or they could have done nothing at all. One of the most helpful things for the business environment is stability. Knowing exactly what the government is going to do, because that's what it has always done, relieves a business from expending capital on adjusting to changing conditions.
Of course, no government would ever have done nothing, as the citizens wouldn't have stood for it. But, so long as we're spinning moonbeams...
Parent
While we're on analogies: (Score:5, Insightful)
You can't spend your way out of a bad economic cycle; that's like drinking more beer as a solution to a hangover.
While we're on analogies: Government stimulus packages don't - because the money they hand out has to come from somewhere. That somewhere is either additional money they tax away (typically from the most productive - the ones they were trying to "stimulate") or by "printing" (or equivalent) new money which gets its value by pulling value out of the money already out there. And the government handling of this money has costs. The stimulus is always less than the stifling.
So government "economic stimulus" is like trying to lengthen a blanked by cutting a strip off one end and sewing it onto the other. The blanket not only ends up no longer, but even a bit shorter.
(If not for that loss it would be like daylight savings time. B-) )
For more on this see the broken window falacy [wikipedia.org].
Parent
Infrastructure? (Score:5, Informative)
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 [bloomberg.com] 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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
So government "economic stimulus" is like trying to lengthen a blanked by cutting a strip off one end and sewing it onto the other. The blanket not only ends up no longer, but even a bit shorter.
Incorrect. Because the government can borrow during busts and pay it back during booms, a government stimulus during a recession is like borrowing one of your blankets from summer to keep you warmer in winter.
For more on this see the broken window fallacy.
The broken window fallacy only applies when you are spending on something with no value. That would indeed be retarded. But if the government is spending on useful infrastructure or something else that provides value or creates more room for economic growth, then the broken window fallacy would be irre
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
I am mostly libertarian but I would say the depression brought about some good legislation.
formation of the SEC, regulating stock offerings (33 act) and the secondary market (34 act) and investment companies (40 act) basically just codified best business practices. Before that is was a free for all. Companies could say anything and get away with anything.
Stuff you take for granted now had to be codified in laws years ago so you can take it for granted now.
Begging the question (Score:3, Insightful)
You do realize, I hope, that you are citing the conclusion of your hypothesis as proof of it?
As long as we're on speculative economics in an alternate history, would you care to address the events of 1937-1938?
You can spend out of a recession (Score:2, Interesting)
History has shown a country can and has spent their way out of recession(s). It was called the WPA. Learn a little history: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_Progress_Administration [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
The main thing that caused the Great Depression and the same thing that is causing our current financial crisis is wild asset speculation funded by easy credit. Borrowing money to outbid each other on existing assets only adds to the interest burden of society without increasing our gross production capacity.
Encouraging people to borrow more and spend more in an attempt to stimulate the economy is grossly negligent. Yet this is exactly the strategy economist have used to get out of the last three recession
Mod Parent Insightful or Informative (Score:2, Insightful)
Regulation is required to get some transparency and a better sense of confidence into markets. CDO's are the perfect example.
How big is the market for CDO's? What's the liability to investors? Were counterparties *required* to put up capital? What are the terms of the CDO agreements? What kind of leverage is there in CDO's?
None of those questions can be answered at this time and yet once-mighty investment banks literally vanished overnight with unknown leverage conditions.
Right idea, bad example... (Score:3, Funny)
> This is Forbes, after all. According to Forbes, the Great Depression was proof of the need for less government regulation.
Too many Libertarians here will actually agree with that. Let's put that another way that Slashdotters might understand:
This is Forbes. They had Daniel Lyons writing about how SCO would win against those Communist Linux hippies.
Network neutrality (Score:4, Insightful)
This is Forbes, after all. According to Forbes, the Great Depression was proof of the need for less government regulation.
How would government regulation help in this case? Peering has to make economic sense for both parties or they wouldn't do it. All that happens after peering is broken is that the routers are reconfigured to send traffic over their transit links instead of the peer links. Ultimately, customers are not hurt (except for downtime because of an unplanned link outage).
The government has no business inserting itself into this agreement. The government is not in the business of understanding the economic conditions that provoke peering agreements.
I recall reading an article a few years ago about how Yahoo gets approximately half of it's total bandwidth for free. It makes economic sense for content providers to peer with content consumers. This is where the net neutrality thing breaks down. Large content providers make sure they create links that make sure their content gets to eye balls quickly. The smaller content providers don't get this privilege unless they use content caching services or they find a co-lo that has a network with plenty of peering agreements already in place. Is it unfair? Yeah, so? That's how the chips fall.
If Verizon finds out that enough of their customer traffic is destined to Cogent, it only makes sense for them to peer. Both Cogent and Verizon have a huge number of peering agreements and I wouldn't be surprised if not having this agreement in place really makes that much of a difference to either one of them.
Parent
government regulation: the devil is in the details (Score:5, Insightful)
Is anyone else here tired of knee-jerk partisanship framing discussion in terms of false dichotomies? Government involvement can do a whole lot of good or a whole lot of bad. The devil is always in the details.
Good: regulate to prevent monopolization of last-mile utilities and reduce barriers to competition.
Bad: let lobbyists who supported your campaign write bills that hand out huge billion dollar tax breaks to carriers to build out the next generation "information superhighway" and sit idle while all of that money goes straight into the pockets of shareholders instead while countries like South Korea [nytimes.com] and Japani [iht.com] take the lead in broadband while America slowly turns into a broadband backwater [blogspot.com].
Hopefully things will work out a little differently in the new administration.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
You started off that post great, but it all went downhill in the "Bad:" section.
Using tiny, *tiny*, whole countries as an example is flawed. Over 90% of Japanese live in less than 20% of the total area Japan occupies. To illustrate further, the US could easily bring New York City into the 'fiber to your door' reality for about the same cost of the entire country of Japan. Unfortunately for your argument, 90% of Americans don't live in New York City, or rather, in 2% of the area of the entire USA.
If that wer
Re:government regulation: the devil is in the deta (Score:4, Insightful)
Pretty much.
...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.
It is, in fact, inconceivable that Forbes would make any other case. Ideology predetermines their arguments, and in this case, the ideology at work is a sort of economic anarchism that, quite frankly, has been completely discredited by the current state of affairs in the US economy. Not all regulation is "government meddling"; some of it is necessary to protect consumers -- and often even vendors -- from dishonesty and short-sighted greed that is often harmful in the long run to the miscreants themselves.
It is at least mildly ironic that the proponents of economic anarchism are often simultaneously proponents of a hardline law-and-order position in other areas of law.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The real question on regulation is if it does more good than harm. The easiest way for me to think about it is as a controls system.
It can be underdamped (no regulation), meaning that the industry will go to extreme highs and lows as companies go for short term profits and take advantage of monopolistic opportunities only to be bitten in the ass by those same policies later. Any slight impact on the industry will send companies fortunes flying high or crashing low. There is also little need to innovate s
Re: (Score:2)
Government involvement can do a whole lot of good or a whole lot of bad.
AND. Government involvement does a whole lot of good AND a whole lot of bad. Any time there's government involvement you can pretty much count on getting both.
Some Regulation (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
But what if NO peering agreement existed to begin with? Sprint gave Cogent a YEAR - how much more notice do they need???
Re: (Score:2)
OK, forget the "peering" wording then. If any major backbone provider plans to disconnect ANY type of connection (peering or paid) they should have to give the warning.
At least Sprint did give Cogent the written notice in this case (about 90 days if I recall correctly). However, neither company notified any of thier customers.
Re:Some Regulation (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Parent
TFA paints a more even picture (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Whoops, meant to include the complaint [slashdot.org].
They are bandits (Score:5, Informative)
This is not the first time Cogent act like bandits.
http://gigaom.com/2008/03/18/cogent-ceo-peering-breakdown-is-telias-fault/ [gigaom.com]
Strange story (Score:3, Interesting)
There seems to be a tags issue (Score:4, Insightful)
Looking at the tags for this story (and many others), it seems tags are being used more for comments on the story than as a useful means to group stories by tag. For instance here we have the tags 'corporatewhining' and 'fuckemboth', both of which are most definitely a comment on the story, not a useful tag as such, well, not very useful as comment either, truth be told.
For that matter, the more useless a tag, the more likely it is to be of a derogatory nature.
That's pretty broken really, not even slightly useful as a feature.
Perhaps there should be a list from which people select, such as there is when submitting stories
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I'm surprised anybody looks at the tags.
They're not good for anything, even if they were utterly correct.
I take that back--I'm sure they're good for something, but they're not at all useful. Meaningless featureitis for Slashcode.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
If you're not interested in flamebait stories, then you're on the wrong website.
Re: (Score:2)
The only point current slashdot tags have are as a off-hand on-liner, a sort of impromptu poll. The mumbled voice of the masses, if you will.
There is a perceived need for this sort of "quick comment", and the tags serve this need, albeit poorly.
The original purpose of the tags, to allow easier searches, the finding of related stories, etc, would be much better served by a proper search function on slashdot.
Why the hell do we need a "story" tag for example?
Frankly, the idea to search for all stories about m
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree that tags aren't especially useful, but they're occasionally handy for things like 'badsummary' or 'flamebait.' Hasn't that been one of the requests around here forever--"Can we moderate stories 'flamebait'?"
They're also a great source of funny one-liners: a story the other day about a guy in the military who asked "what can I do about this crappy laptop?" had "chargeback" and "airstrike" as the first two tags.
But which of them broke the Internet? (Score:2, Interesting)
When *I* kill a peering, the traffic is rerouted through the Internet. Please don't tell me Cogent and Sprint don't use BGP! So why did traffic stop flowing?
Re: (Score:2)
Traffic stopped flowing because neither Sprint nor Cogent paid for any alternate paths through the Net. This depeering reveals the fragility of the Tier 1 "people pay us, but we don't pay anyone" philosophy.
Tier 1 is about long-haul. (Score:2)
This depeering reveals the fragility of the Tier 1 "people pay us, but we don't pay anyone" philosophy.
Tier 1 is about long-haul vs. last-mile. The last-mile providers have the customers who pay the bills. The Tier 1 carriers have the big long-haul lines which chew up money and don't pay any bills. Money has to flow from the customers to pay for all the pieces of the path.
It's not so cut and dried, of course. Tier 1 companies typically are also last-mile providers as well - just big ones whose internal
Re: (Score:2)
So why did traffic stop flowing?
Because there were no alternate routes — nobody was being paid to provide paid transit between Cogent and Sprint. Pleas see this Slashdot comment [slashdot.org].
Re:But which of them broke the Internet? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Parent
as corrupt as corrupt could be (Score:3, Interesting)
large companies like Sprint have paid off enough local FCC chairs that they are now deregulated, and are gladly unplugging all other ISPs that don't belong to the top 6 or 7. fees just to open the plug-in process are over $10,000 a month, and the bigger ISPs aren't even required to do anything. many local companies here have spent $10,000 for several months, having an open account with AT&T, and AT&T is allowed to sit on their hands because they can. you can pay $10,000 to AT&T and request that they hook you up at the local CO, and they will gladly take the money and say "Thanks for making a formal request", and that is it. end of story.
and here in Oklahoma, AT&T is even double billing the local schools and libraries, but the FCC won't do anything about it. AT&T has a contract in Oklahoma to provide schools/libraries with connections for a certain base price, but because the schools/libraries get and pay their own bills, AT&T sends them bills with higher rates, knowing that the local mayoral staff won't have any clue on what they are supposed to pay.
truth is, we should have an easy way to link into a system that was built with taxpayer money. and we need to actually be able to VOTE on what these big ISPs do, and not rely on the incredibly corrupt state FCC.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
i am actually for some regulation. not really of any content, but to force the larger companies to be more open. fact is, the Internet/phone backbone was built using taxpayer money.
Fact is, Sprint was not a Baby Bell born from the AT&T breakup. Sprint was formed out from a private Railroad communications network. None of your taxes was used to create the Sprint network. So your all for regulating other peoples property?
http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/Sprint-Corporation-Company-History [fundinguniverse.com]
Peering and Transit explained (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, the submitter made a typo, and should have capitalized "the Government", since they were referring to the true Government of the world, of which there is only one.
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With all those people being cut off, what about the claim the internet "heals itself" and routes around damage?
That hasn't been true for many years if it ever was.
If there's any possible route between me and http://slashdot.org/ [slashdot.org] I want the system to find it, dammit!
If a possible route exists but no one has paid for it, traffic won't flow over that route. Your suggestion amounts to bandwidth socialism.
Re: (Score:2)
If there's any possible route between me and http://slashdot.org/ [slashdot.org] I want the system to find it, dammit!
But you're not alone involved. The people who provide the route between you and Slashdot, known as transit providers, want to be paid. Hence, they carefully filter what routes they advertise, and only allow those for which there is a paid agreement for.
This is known as policy routing or route filtering.
Re: (Score:2)
If you were connected via more than one ISP (not just Cogent or Sprint) then the Internet did heal itself and route around the damage. Its only if you chose to be a sole-source customer of a transit-free provider that it didn't heal.