Sprint Cuts Cogent Off the Internet 413
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."
Ah... that explains it (Score:5, Interesting)
Heh, I was wondering why scoreboard showed they were having issues:
http://scoreboard.keynote.com/scoreboard/Main.aspx [keynote.com]
*sigh*
So it wasn't just an outage.
Something is Fishy Here (Score:5, Interesting)
Neutrality (Score:5, Interesting)
This is what the world might look like without Net Neutrality.
This is not new (Score:2, Interesting)
When my local phone company was having a labour dispute, they blocked the union website. Granted, this incident appears to be on a much larger scale.
My ISP at the time (Interbaun, recently bought by Uniserve) was also affected: They resell the Telus ADSL sevice (because the phone company owns the lines).
http://thetyee.ca/News/2005/08/04/TelusCensor/
According to the link I Dug up, it was back in 2005.
Re:Oh, good. (Score:5, Interesting)
Our company buys quite a bit of transit from Cogent, and Sprint's looking glass sites are showing a complete partition between the two. Also, Cogent has offered free 100Mbit connectivity to any on-net Sprint customers until the issue is resolved.
Re:note to self (Score:5, Interesting)
I think what happened in Monticello, MN with the city laying down their own fiber when TDS telcom (the local telco) refused to is definitely a step in that direction...
Re:So what is Sprint providing its customers? (Score:2, Interesting)
You'd probably want to check the SLA first. Most have provisions that don't apply to this, at least contractually. As an end-customer you'd be buying access to their public network -- if they choose to depeer or black hole another network, they're usually within the right to do that since THEY own the network you're connecting to. Bad business sense yeah, but otherwise it's probably not breaking any contractual agreement with a customer.
Re:So what is Sprint providing its customers? (Score:5, Interesting)
Funny how history repeats itself, especially in Sprint's case. In 1996, Sean Doran (SprintLink senior network architect) decided CIX-W peering was no longer cool and dropped peering, causing one hell of a black hole. From my recollection, it was the first instance where open routing was disabled due to political or commercial objectives, and unfortunately for Sprint, it came at a time where Bob Collett (then head of SprintLink) was trying to promote Sprint's openness and participation in the community. Bob overruled his engineer and routing was restored several days later.
Since that point, BGP black holes have continued, usually to the detriment of customers. BBN Planet, Exodus and numerous others played the game presuming that content was more important than eyeballs or vice versa. The fallacy in their model is that content without consumer is as useless as consumer without content. Until they establish that understanding, neither unbalanced provider will succeed.
Re:Neutrality (Score:4, Interesting)
If there exists no route from me to another server on the Internet and the reason that route doesn't exist is due to my ISP, I say that ISP has violated Net Neutrality. However, since as far as I know Net Neutrality currently has no legal definition, this is purely an issue of network ethics rather than an issue of law.
This may be just the beginning of this stuff... (Score:5, Interesting)
As of now, there are no laws that an ISP has to deliver packets to any site, or any port.
IMHO, this is just the start of this type of activity. Eventually (assuming no regulation is done), ISPs will just refuse traffic from any domain who doesn't pay them a certain amount per bit per month. So, if Yahoo doesn't pay ISP "A" a fee so their bits will go across, all that ISP's subscribers would see either the destination unreachable, or even worse, be redirected to another site.
As of now, there are no laws against ISPs doing this. One could in the future attempt to go to their bank, be redirected to another bank because the other bank pays the ISP to carry their traffic and refuse the other bank access.
disruptive pricing (Score:5, Interesting)
All of Cogent's previous de-peering problems were ultimately due to their ultra low prices and their ability to steal customers. I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case again. Everyone has a lot of money to lose with Cogent's $6/Mbps pricing today. It undercuts everyone else. Cogent is basically wiping them clean (and not making much money in the process.) Ultimately they are banking on MUCH larger uses in the future. But their business model is not exactly profitable.
Lawyers and clients (Score:5, Interesting)
Re - "It is the wish of my client." -- I'm reminded of what Richard Nixon's lawyer [wikipedia.org] famously said while arguing before the US Supreme Court in US v. Nixon [wikipedia.org]: "The President wants me to argue that he is as powerful a monarch as Louis XIV, only four years at a time, and is not subject to the processes of any court in the land except the court of impeachment." He knew it was a nutty position to take, so he explicitly stated that it was his client's position, not his.
Re:Cogent depeering (Score:1, Interesting)
There was also a depeering incident between Cogent and Telia earlier this year.
Cogent was the one to pull the plug in that case, but it doesn't really matter -- it got pulled because Cogent had a dispute with one of its peers, and they no longer found it mutually beneficial to interconnect. Cogent finds itself in these kinds of situations disproportionately often.
Re:Cogent depeering (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Cogent is the one behind the story in link (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:So what is Sprint providing its customers? (Score:5, Interesting)
Cogent (Score:5, Interesting)
Is This Criminal Fraud? (Score:3, Interesting)
Am I understanding this correctly? Sprint is reporting the packets as delivered but they are actually dropped? If so, why isn't this criminal fraud? If FedEx took your money, told you the package was delivered, but then threw the package away, there would be severe criminal and civil penalties. Existing law about lying and forgery needs to be applied to packet headers (also applies to the forged reset packets Comcast was using to throttle P2P traffic). If I'm misunderstanding the situation, I would appreciate it if someone could explain why.
Re:Oh, good. (Score:4, Interesting)
When we called Sprint's customer service department, they couldn't cancel the charges because nobody in the company was allowed to talk to the fraud investigation department. Nine months of complaints, refusals to pay, and BBB calls later, we finally got all the charges dropped, but I'll never work with Sprint again.
Re:disruptive pricing (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually Cogent's best price is $4/Mbps for 10Gb/s links.
Cogent's business model is much simpler than the other big ISPs. Unmetered IP transit. That's it.
No complex metering and billing and 10,000 products and services.
You can buy 10/100/1000/10000/40000 Mb/s ip transit blocks. that's it.
They are also not making any money.
That's the real problem.
The other big ISPs are used to fat profit margins while Cogent is apparently happy to break even (at best).
There is also a timing factor... while some other tier-1s were still grinning about their shiny new 10Gb/s backbones Cogent was lighting theirs at 40Gb/s across the board. Being a late-comer made their network cheaper to build. That and snapping up dark fiber on the cheap from bankrupt companies.
All in all, Cogent is fucking fantastic for the consumer.
Re:Guess what? (Score:3, Interesting)
To over-generalize the contributions of one profession or the other on society is specious.
I'm not over generalizing, or even generalizing at all. A Mathematician pursuing his profession doesn't radically alter the structure of society. Engineers and physicists are more likely to. A Lawyer pursuing his profession can and sometimes does, often for the worse.
To rebut your bald statement about the destructive nature of lawyers, it's worth noting that lawyers are responsible for: creating civil liberties such as the right for women and the right for 'colored' people to vote and attend school with white people; writing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; defending Galileo Galilei when he published a "truth" (mathematics) when the church persecuted him for challenging their proprietary access to absolute "truth".
It was a bald statement, but not an absolute one. Your rebuttal fails, though, when you consider that there were lawyers arguing against all of those civil liberties and the rest. Those people *are* scum.
Finally, some attribute the commerce clause (and WTO/GATT-like reductions in interstate discriminatory trade practices) with the creation of more wealth in the United States than any other law in the US federation.
The interstate commerce clause as it was intended is great, but I obviously wasn't talking about that which is why I spoke of the mockery which has been made of it. All the various farm welfare programs, drug laws and the like are all justified by the sleazy, entirely unjustifiable interpretation of it to mean that the government can do anything to anyone anywhere since anything could possibly have an affect on some form of commerce.
That was a scumbag lawyer who pushed that bullshit through may he burn in hell.
With your position, no one would ever have challenged segregation in the Southern US, the right for women to vote, the right for women to have abortions, or other now often considered fundamental rights; and
No, with my position there never would have been a need to challenge such things as there was never any justification for them in the first place.
That is unintelligible nonsense. As one specific rebuttal, contingency fees give good lawyers economic incentive to engage in representation for claims by people who otherwise could not afford access to justice.
No, it's a simple statement of the facts as they are. Explain, if you would, how I can get a good lawyer on contingency when I'm charged with a crime? There's no payoff to cover the fees. I get a public defender which means basically pot luck. There are very good lawyers in the public defender's office and very poor ones. I had the misfortune to need a public defender long ago when I got the shit beat out of me by some cops who then charged me with assault (when my foot hit one of their shins when they were running up to beat me on the head with their maglite when I was already cuffed and maced) destruction of property (when said flashlight no longer worked after impacting my cranium) and resisting arrest (when I was on the ground covering my head yelling "I'm not resisting arrest"). I had 2 witnesses who testified and all of those specifics were brought up in court and not refuted. I still lost because my lawyer had more fun making assinine arguments which while logically valid were ridiculous and pissed off the jury. I saw the moment at which I lost in the juror's faces when my lawyer was going off on his third such tangent. Had I been able to afford a decent lawyer at the time it would have been an open and shut case and then I might have been able to get a lawyer on contingency to sue the city, but without being able to afford a competent lawyer for the criminal trial that avenue was cut off.
Hell, OJ got away with murder solely due to his ability to afford a row of sleazy lawyers.
Without lawyers, you wouldn't have to consider what it would be like to live in this world- we still would.
However, once again yo
Re:Wish I could Mod the Parent to Ten (Score:3, Interesting)
The UK is doing better [iht.com] lately.
You know, this kind of article really depresses me. Why is it that whenever there's some common sense and decency in our government that it's found in the archaic hold-overs from feudal traditions rather than the people we elected?
Re:While you still have connectivity (Score:3, Interesting)
Because Sprint isn't merely unplugging things. they're actively blackholing (redirecting all traffic to nowhere) Cogent, which sabotages automatic route-around-damage systems, as it makes it seem like the data is being passed successfully.
UUCP allows you to pretty much manually route around by explicitly defining the path (a bangpath). Thanks to the wonderful redundancy of the internet, there is pretty much always a usable path between any 2 points, though said path may be ridiculously non-optimal, like going from Chicago to New York via Paris, Berlin, and Moscow, and thus likely won't get routed through automatically.
The free service is only if you're on-net (Score:3, Interesting)
One part of Cogent's business model is selling to multiple-tenant business buildings, where they can stick a router in the basement and run Fast Ethernet connections to multiple customers, and most of the 1300 buildings where they're on-net are either that kind of arrangement or else businesses they've built connections to directly (including some hosting centers.) For the MTU market, what this means is that all it costs them is some inside wiring and a bit of extra traffic on their free peering links.
Back around 2000 they were selling Fast Ethernet to this market for about the price most other carriers charged for 2-3 T1s (i.e. 3-4 Mbps for $2-4K.) I don't think most of their customers expected sustained dependable throughput of 100 Mbps for that price - but just about everybody expected to get more than 3 Mbps almost all the time, so it was a win, especially as a second carrier connection.
Renesys Blog article on the depeering (Score:3, Interesting)
Renesys [renesys.com] is a fairly neutral source for information about peering (as opposed to Cogent's press release, which is obviously their side of the story.) The Forbes article is good perspective, but it's from before Sprint dropped Cogent. BTW, Sprint and Cogent have only been peering for two years; before that Cogent had to pay to connect to them.