Behind the Cogent-Sprint Depeering 325
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.
No comment from Cogent (Score:5, Funny)
They're unreachable due to no internet connection.
They're back? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:They're back? (Score:5, Funny)
Are they connected again? The traffic is flowing.
The Spacing Guild must have complained.
The spice must flow!
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
>>>It is Sprints obligation under those contracts to maintain routable connections to Cogent.
False. Sprint is under no obligation to maintain your contact to a non-paying customer - just as Bell Telephone is under no obligation to make-sure you can contact with your ne'er-do-well uncle who didn't pay his phone bill.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Read the article. Sprint gave Cogent ample advance warning. Cogent did nothing to mitigate the problem. The way the article is written gives the impression that Cogent's only connection to the internet came through Sprint. At one point Sprint had 10 interconnects up with Cogents network. Over the course of close to two months they gradually reduced the number of interconnections with Cogent's full awareness of what was taking place.
Where is there any precident that Sprint has to maintain routes for the
Re:They're back? (Score:4, Informative)
Sprint has reconnected to Cogent to mitigate the connectivity loss for the time being.
Re:They're back? (Score:5, Informative)
Just like what happened with Level(3) a few years ago.
Cogent's history in the ISP market has been absolutely horrible. They came in to town as the Walmart of ISPs, investing in a huge new super-efficient backbone infrastructure doing everything it could to cut costs so they could offer insane deals to their customers. They were running 10Gigabit connections using existing fiber and brand new equipment. They had no 'legacy' hardware.
The hosting industry bit into the Cogent game when they had customers running multimedia sites that needed tons of bandwidth (see: porn) and were tired of paying insane rates per mbps when Cogent had this brand new network with tons of capacity.
But Cogent wasn't in the 'settlement free interconnect' game yet, they were paying for bandwidth themselves. So they went out and purchased a few ISPs that already had settlement free interconnects. The agreements are already in place, so it was a big win situation for them. But these agreements almost always come with the term that you must give as much as you receive (so you need to have a balance between hosted sites and end users.) Cogent didn't have end users, they had servers.
Think of it this way: I am an apartment complex and I have an agreement to mow my neighbor's lawn and in exchange he shovels my sidewalk. It uses approximately the same amount of work. Now imagine my neighbor and all of his agreements are bought by the local golf course. Now the golf course now expects me to mow the entire course because the agreement was that they would shovel and I would mow. Cogent was the golf course, I am an ISP.
Now in my apartment I house a bunch of golfers once I say "screw this, figure out your lawn situation yourself" the course says "ok, well, I guess your tenants are going to have to go without golf." What the hell am I to do now? Mow this golf course to keep my tenants happy?
Finally I come to an agreement, the golf course has to pay me a small amount and I will mow their grass. Everything seems OK, but then the golf course gets in to a bit of trouble and all of a sudden decides "OK, well... he doesn't want his tenants to go without golf so he will probably keep mowing our grass even if we stop paying him." Here we are again, I'm in an impossible situation because I really care about my tenants but man, I just cannot mow an entire golf course all by myself. So I send the golf course warnings after warnings, and after I reach a tipping point I just say "GFY, I'm not mowing your course anymore." I stop mowing it, and the golf course says "IT IS TOTALLY HIS FAULT THAT YOU CANNOT PLAY GOLF!!!"
Right now a lot of ISPs can hit Cogent's old pricing (and Cogent just cannot go any lower than they already are) so a lot if ISPs will just pass on Cogent and go for someone with a better record.
There is a lot more to the story that we don't know about, and since these agreements are generally done under a NDA we will never know for sure what exactly is happening at Cogent.
Just a FYI: I work for a hosting company that has had some dealings with Cogent in the past.
The Customers Want the Sites Not Sprint or Cogent (Score:5, Insightful)
Sprint customers are buying access to sites on Cogent.
Nobody buys a Sprint or Cogent connection to get to Sprint or Cogent. They want the data from the content provider sites (pr0n and http://archive.org/ [archive.org] ).
Therefor Sprint is really profiting on people's desire to get to sites inside Cogent. If they cut off those sites people will drop them and get somebody else
who provides the access.
Re:They're back? (Score:5, Insightful)
Think of it this way: I am an apartment complex and I have an agreement to mow my neighbor's lawn and in exchange he shovels my sidewalk. It uses approximately the same amount of work. Now imagine my neighbor and all of his agreements are bought by the local golf course. Now the golf course now expects me to mow the entire course because the agreement was that they would shovel and I would mow. Cogent was the golf course, I am an ISP.
That is how the big carriers see it, but it is pure nonsense! Network A has a server on it and network B has a client (browser). Each has been paid by their customer to provide internet service. If A is sending a bunch of data over the peering connection w/ B, it's because B's customers asked for it. If A and B stop talking, both carrier's customers are no longer getting the full connectivity they paid for.
The only part that makes any sense in the various peering squabbles is paying for the upkeep of the peering link and trying to keep things so that the aggregate of the routes is more or less at the midpoint so each is bearing equal cost for equal benefit.
Keep in mind, often enough, a peering is nothing more than a cat 5 from one rack to the next rack over and a few lines in a configuration file.
As far as dealings with Cogent, they and MANY other carriers have deeply screwed up accounting departments amongst other problems.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Intermittent Connection: (Score:2)
Folk-Lore. (Score:4, Insightful)
"It will be interesting to see how Cogent responds."
"When the internet senses damage it routes around it." Oh wait!
Err, no. (Score:3, Insightful)
So yeah, some routers might need to update their tables, but otherwise, we're still connected. Proving the ARPANET design once again.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
So yeah, some routers might need to update their tables, but otherwise, we're still connected. Proving the ARPANET design once again.
See, Al Gore really was a genius.
Re:Err, no. (Score:5, Insightful)
Cogent can pay any ISP they want (Score:4, Interesting)
The AC who posted Article #25607411 [slashdot.org] misses the point that Sprint customers can't reach Cogent customers and vice versa unless somebody connects some routes. Users of other ISPs are fine, and small ISPs that have Sprint as an upstream are likely to multihome to multiple upstream carriers for reliability, so they're ok. The two main parties that are affected are Sprint wireless customers and hosting companies that only use Cogent (a fairly large market, because Cogent's per-megabit charges are cheap), and Sprint thinks the latter are more likely to pressure Cogent into fixing it.
From Sprint's perspective, Cogent can buy transit from almost any ISP they want and that'll fix the problem. Sprint could also buy transit from somebody connected to Cogent, but Tier 1 carriers have ego problems about this, and of course if Sprint were willing to do that they'd have been willing to continue free peering with Cogent as well.
Sprint wireless users can also tunnel through various tunnel servers to get to non-Sprint parts of the net. Possibly "Google Secure Access" will work (it's free, intended for users of Google's Wifi services, but may be more generally usable), and there's the Tor Anonymity Network [wikipedia.org].
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
At work today I had several customers call in because they couldn't get to websites. One person used their wireless card to do online classes for school but their school was using cogent for their ISP, guess what they haven't been able to access since friday.
Re: (Score:2)
On the one hand, I'd say the school in question should have been multihomed if their connectivity is critical.
As a multihomed Cogent transit customer, Sprint should've been multihomed so their EVDO customers could still get to Cogent if the peering went bad.
If Cogent or Sprint were purposefully dumping packets of the other to the bitbucket, the whole multihoming argument is moot.
Re:Err, no. (Score:5, Informative)
Multihoming doesn't fix the problem. It does double your costs.
For example, I know one site that was multi-homed. They had Sprint and a regional provider. The regional provider was de-peered by Cogent about a year ago, and the regional provider only buys transit from Sprint (they peer with many other networks).
Guess what, he couldn't reach the University he just executed a major contract with -- they are single-homed through Cogent.
And what do end users do? Multihome?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
There were no routes between Sprint and Cogent, which means anyone who only reached Cogent via Sprint and vice versa (including anyone who was single-homed to either) could not reach the other. IIRC, it was about 210 ASes on one side, 270 ASes on the other.
Re: (Score:2)
My lay understanding of the situatin is that, once routing tables are changed to reflect the new topography, most everything goes back to normal except for higher latency as traffic has to take less than optimal routes.
Can anyone cite specific & non-anectodal examples of major internet links that have not and can not be rerouted because of this depeering?
Re: (Score:2)
How can they, if their traffic isn't being routed?
Re:Folk-Lore. (Score:4, Insightful)
Except for sprint customers, usually. Which advertised the peered routes, and which usually take quite a bit of time to get updated routing... I'm afraid that's the whole point. Quite a few depeerings in the past were politically motivated, well not quite politically, but market-share-driven. I thought the MCI/Uunet fiasco would have ended such practices.
Re:Folk-Lore. (Score:5, Informative)
My lay understanding of the situatin is that, once routing tables are changed to reflect the new topography, most everything goes back to normal
My just as lay understanding is that that would be the case were Sprint not actively filtering [wikipedia.org] routes from Cogent.
In other words, assuming I understand the situation right, Sprint are taking active measures to make sure that routes that originate in the Cogent network never reach Sprint's customers.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I think you mean the other way around; Cogent filtered AS1239 paths, blamed Sprint, and offered Sprint customers free circuits. Cogent customers were still visible via XO through Sprint during this mess, but Cogent filtered the traffic.
Re:Folk-Lore. (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you mean the other way around; Cogent filtered AS1239 paths, blamed Sprint, and offered Sprint customers free circuits. Cogent customers were still visible via XO through Sprint during this mess, but Cogent filtered the traffic.
Right, I think I'm starting to understand. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Over one year ago, cogent got free peering from Sprint, and subsequently filtered out all alternative routes to Sprint. I read this as Cogent blackmailing Sprint: if you disconnect us, there will be no connectivity between your customers and ours.
Last week, Sprint decided not to go with Cogent's blackmail, and disconnected Cogent with no advance notice to their (Sprint's) customers.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, it appears that Sprint finally got tired of Cogent's unwillingness to pay for connection and disconnected them after giving Cogent more than adequate notice.
The problem is that Sprint gave THEIR OWN CUSTOMERS zero notice that they were going to kill their access to a fair chunk of the internet by de-peering Cogent.
The bosses and bean counters at Sprint were only looking at the business case between the two carriers, NOT at the services they would severely affect for their customers.
I suspect that is wh
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not a case of cannot. It's a matter of WILL NOT for business reasons. If I peer w/ Sprint, and I peer w/ Cogent, why in the world would I offer them free transit to each other?
The other routes are not advertised because the carriers involved are not willing to carry traffic for free and are not under any sort of must carry law.
When two networks peer, it's just routers in one network that have a connection to routers in the other network. Each connected router announces the routes it's willing to accept
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
That would be the case with most normal isp's but Cogent purchased enough ISP's in the last few years to now be considered Tier 1. They do not purchase bandwidth from anyone. If I remember correctly they purchased Verio giving them the peering agreement with AOL/TW. They do not block the traffic to the sprint network, they just don't have any transit agreements in place. (they peer with every other Tier 1 provider) Having a transit agreement in place would make them Tier 2 and they would probably have Tier
Holy Shit (Score:5, Informative)
Cogent press release: "Sprint [severed its Internet connection to Cogent] in violation of a contractual obligation to exchange traffic with Cogent on a settlement free peering basis."
FACT: At no time did Sprint and Cogent enter into a contract for settlement free peering. In 2006, Sprint and Cogent formed a commercial trial agreement that ended in September 2007. Cogent was unable to satisfy the agreed-upon traffic exchange criteria within the trial agreement, yet refused to pay Sprint or disconnect from Sprint's network.
If what Sprint says is true, Cogent has just dug itself a hole and not just in the court room.
Either there was a settlement free peering contract in place, or there wasn't.
Cogent can spin all it wants, but they aren't actually supposed to lie in a press release.
Cogent's press release would definitely constitute a material statement, which means they could be hearing from the SEC for lying to the public and investors.
Re:Holy Shit (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Holy Shit (Score:4, Informative)
You are correct. Don't forget Telia, AOL, Teleglobe, and France Telecom either.
Re:Holy Shit (Score:5, Insightful)
You usually end up as the red-headed step child when your competitors charge $50-100/Mb for connectivity and you charge $4.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
How soon we forget:
http://ask.slashdot.org/askslashdot/05/10/05/2247207.shtml?tid=95
Re:Holy Shit (Score:5, Insightful)
If Cogent was your sole provider at this point, you'd either be an idiot or completely out of touch. This isn't the first time this has happened with Cogent. It isn't the second either. And it surely won't be the last.
Sprint doesn't get off so easy though. They pulled what amounts to a "sure, try it risk free for 3 months. Cancel if you don't like it, but if you fail to inform us in triplicate you owe us hundreds of thousands of dollars." That's a crock.
Nobody who initiates a settlement-free peering agreement intends to pay for a transit connection if the trial period doesn't work out. If there was a serious chance that Cogent could be convinced to buy service from Sprint, Sprint would never have agreed to peering since the two types of connection are mutually incompatible. And Sprint damn well knows it.
Then too, Sprint probably decided to block Cogent's routes from the rest of their peers. Otherwise I expect Cogent would simply have routed around the downed connections. That was a step too far, one which makes Sprint a dangerous selection as your sole carrier as well.
Re:Holy Shit (Score:5, Informative)
That's not what Sprint said - "Following a three-month commercial trial agreement during June - September 2007, the peering trial data indicated that Cogent did not meet the minimum traffic exchange criteria agreed to by both parties. As a result, settlement-free peering was not established and Cogent was notified in writing of these results." Given Cogent's history, it seems that Sprint was just covering its bases and trying to find a way to work with Cogent instead of just telling them to go fark themselves when they first approached Sprint about a settlement-free agreement.
Re:Dishonorable (Score:5, Informative)
After 3 months, the traffic from Cogent wasn't as much as Cogent claimed it would be, and Sprint opted not to continue with the creation of a real settlement-free peering contract.
Nobody pulled out of anything, Cogent claimed their network passed more traffic than it really did and Sprint had no motivation to let them leech for free.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
How is offering an alternative 'unilaterally converting' anything?
The part were Sprint sues Cogent for non-payment on the never-accepted alternative.
But your Sprint/Cogent dialog is pretty much on target.
Re:Holy Shit (Score:5, Interesting)
Is anyone actually surprised that Cogent is being dicks again? I'm going to believe Sprint's side of the story because: 1) they don't get into peering fights every other month, 2) they don't release nasty press releases about their former peer, and 3) they don't route traffic for their former peer into a black hole and blame someone else. If you or I didn't pay our bills, we'd be nuked *way* faster than Sprint is saying they gave Cogent. The length of time is probably because Sprint knows that Cogent would be assholes about it and that it would break traffic in a bad way.
So many people from the previous thread put all the blame on Sprint because of that horrible press release Cogent had ready the second the last circuit was turned off. Did they all forget that this is Cogent the king of depeering bitch fights that we're talking about? They always cry foul and scream about it every time they get depeered.
Re:Holy Shit (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
why should Cogent have to pay Sprint for peering instead of the other way around?
the internet is only useful to everyone when it is a single contiguous network. if it's just hundreds of small patches of connected networks it's absolutely useless to everyone.
Sprint and Cogent already have their customers which produce their revenue stream. peering their networks is mutually beneficial since it increases connectivity and allows traffic to be routed between the two networks more efficiently.
seems like Sprint i
Re:Holy Shit (Score:5, Informative)
granted, if you own a larger network, you can extort smaller networks (and all of their customers) for money. but that makes Sprint the asshole, not Cogent. claiming that Cogent is in the wrong just because they've been de-peered in the past without actually examining the details of the conflict to see whether Sprint's claims make any sense is rather naive. this isn't like high school where one's merits are based on their popularity. getting picked on often doesn't automatically make you wrong.
If you have a larger network then you're probably handling more traffic on behalf of a smaller network than vice versa. By your rationale, any company or person that sets up a small network (e.g. 3 computers) should be able to get free connectivity from sprint or another backbone provider.
The way the peering thing usually works is when companies A and B decide to peer, they track the traffic that they pass to each other. If the traffic is roughly even then they don't charge each other for the peering. On the other hand, if things are lopsided such as 80% of the traffic being company A handling requests for company B's users, then company B usually is required to pay for the excess bandwidth that it's using.
Yep (Score:5, Informative)
It may help people to think of it on a personal level: So suppose you and I are neighbors. I have a nice business class cable connection, you have a nice business class DSL connection. Now turns out we do a lot of traffic between each other, which doesn't go particularly fast since it goes over the net but also since it turns out our connections are routed very differently and have a lot if hops to get to each other. So being geeks, we decide to fix this by peering our networks. We connect up a Cat-5 connection between our houses and set up routers to handle things. What's more, we share each other's net. So traffic goes out the connection based on who's got the shortest route. Also if one connection goes out, we use the other one exclusively till it comes back up.
Now we don't charge each other for this service. We both pay our own costs. I pay for my line, you pay for yours and so on. Hence we are peers. The reason we do this is we both benefit equally form the relationship.
Ok so then another neighbor finds out about this. He's on dialup and would like something better. We say sure you can join our network, but you have to pay. Why? Well he isn't providing us any value. He's just going to cancel his dialup and use our network. That's great, but he's got to help with the costs. Also, he doesn't have anything we want, we aren't going to be accessing his files, so there is no peer situation. We sell him access.
In the case of Cogent it would be like a 4th neighbor. He asks to peer. He says he's got a wireless connection to a great provider, plus lots of stuff we'd want. So we decide to let him on as a peer. However, it turns out to be false. His link is slow and high latency, so we end up just using ours. Further he just uses our connections, since they are better for everything. Finally, we find little data from him we want. So we tell him "Know what? You can pay us to stay on our network, but we aren't letting you peer because we don't get anything out of it."
The idea of peering is just that: You connect to your peers, you equals. Those networks that have data you want, and you have data they want. Since it is an equal agreement, both sides bear their own costs. In unequal agreements, like you purchasing a connection from your ISP, then you have to pay.
It's not a matter of what you have (Score:4, Informative)
It's what your network does, over all. A datacentre still pays for all their bandwidth. It isn't a situation of "consumers pay, providers don't." What it comes down to is if it is more advantageous to trade with someone, rather than both of you going through a third party. Remember you can peer on any level. My neighborhood peering thing could be a reality, if people wanted to do so. As a practical matter I work for a university and we do peer with some institutions.
Basically it's a situation of how much data you need to get to and from network X, and how much it costs you and them to do so. If you are both going through another company, especially if you both have to pay that company, it may be in your best interests to peer your networks. However peering isn't free, you are paying for equipment and space and rights of way and such so that you can hook your networks together. So this is only worth it if the sharing is on equal ground. If it turns out that it isn't, well then maybe one side needs to pay.
Part of the equality thing isn't just direction of traffic, it is destination. If we peer our connections, as in my example, and 95% of the traffic you get from me is stuff on my network, well that's a useful peer to me. I cut down on my traffic to other networks, and you do the same. However if 95% of the traffic is in fact destined for other networks, then you are leeching off me, and should be paying. It isn't a useful peer if what you are doing is using that link just to get to other places. That just loads down my other links.
So that's how it works. The big networks peer with each other because they all have a lot of traffic that needs to flow to each other. It would be silly for AT&T to send all traffic for Sprint through Level 3, rather they just connect themselves and do it direct. The same thing can be true of smaller peers. Company A and Company B realize they do a lot of traffic, and thus setup a little peer network so they aren't loading up their Internet connections. However that only works when it is an equal share situation. If Sprint were to use AT&T's links mainly to contact other networks (especially large networks), AT&T would want to start charging for the links. Same deal if Company B jsut starts using the link to use Company A's bandwidth.
Re: (Score:2)
That's like saying Sprint should pay me to peer with my tiny home network because Sprint would have more connections being initiated. It doesn't make any sense.
Cogent should pay Sprint to peer with them because Sprint has more to offer than Cogent does. It's more likely Cogent customers want access to Sprint's larger network than it is Sprint's customers want access to Cogent's smaller network. At least that's the theory.
At this point it's basically down to who's customers scream about it loudest.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
why should Cogent have to pay Sprint for peering instead of the other way around?
The company that sends the most data outbound (i.e., off their network to someplace else on the Internet) pays in peering agreements.
This really only applies to "leaf" companies who are dealing with other companies to get transit to other places. The Tier 1 providers are essentially "the backbone", and although they tend to send the most off their network, much of that does not originate on their network, but is merely passing through. Also, they have the big club where they can just cut off a leaf networ
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's assume that I am a B2B kind of guy. (I don't want to deal with "end users", I want to deal with businesses - Business 2 Business)
So I set up a high-end network. I'm going to carry massive amounts of data, and peer with existing "tier 1" providers to shuffle data with/for them. Let's just assume that I have significantly more bandwidth than Sprint or Cogent, and for this argument, I'll be a "tier 0" provider.
If I peered with Sprint/Cogent/ATT/XO in order to provide service to them, how would I get paid
Re:Holy Shit (Score:4, Funny)
Wait a minute? Are you saying companies aren't allowed to just lie in public whenever they like? This doesn't seem to be enforced very often.
Re: (Score:2)
Wait a minute? Are you saying companies aren't allowed to just lie in public whenever they like? This doesn't seem to be enforced very often.
The most public example that most /.ers will recognize is the SCO case.
McBride was shooting his mouth off at every opportunity before things went to trial, then he suddenly stopped talking to the press.
Unfortunately for him, it was too late, because all his public statements bit SCO in the ass when they were entered as evidence in court.
Re: (Score:2)
yeah, it seems that way but those guys often have a way almost telling a lie, and not correcting your misconception.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Seems to me the "commercial trial agreement" constitutes a "settlement free peering agreement." Now IANAL but I suspect that at the very least it would be necessary to prove that Cogent KNEW or should have known that the contractual conditions that would have turned the trial agreement into a longer term proposition did not occur.
In other words it seems to me that Cogent and sprint had a contract that said if X,Y and Z occur then we keep peering for free. Cogent may be disagreeing with sprint over whether
Small ISPs are the most vulnerable (Score:3, Interesting)
My ISP gets its connectivity from Cogent. As their customer I can connect to anywhere in the Internet EXCEPT those portions served by Sprint. Because of this corporate disagreement, I am cut off from my e-mail and from my Red Hat Network updates.
I agree with klapaucjusz (1167407) who perceptively asked if we needed regulation at the top carrier level. I agree, and plan to file a complaint with the FCC in the morning.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't understand how any of this requires government regulation. Cogent is supposed to provide internet access to users and other companies. They are not doing that, so they either need to find someone else to peer with, or be sued for breach of contract. I wonder how many companies and individuals Cogent services? I bet they would make other arrangements real fast if their phones were ringing off the hook and the postman delivered a truck-load of court summons.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Small ISPs are the most vulnerable (Score:5, Informative)
Cogent could have, at any time during this depeering, allowed the sprint bound traffic to route through one of their other peering points. This would have allowed their customers, including yourself, to continue to reach the entire internet even though it may have been slightly slower. It's the beauty of the internet, they could have easily routed the traffic elsewhere but they CHOSE to route sprint to a blackhole route.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Wouldn't that necessitate them purchasing transit on one of the other networks, first? Not that it's not the reasonable thing to do, but it seems like it's more involved than just "allowing" the traffic to route somewhere else.
Plus, I'm sure that from a PR perspective they place a lot of stock in being transit-free (ie one of the Big Boys).
Admittedly my understan
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_1_network [wikipedia.org]
By this definition, a Tier 1 Network is a Transit-Free network. But not all Transit-Free Networks are Tier 1 Networks. It is possible to become transit free by paying for peering or agreeing to settlements.
Of course, take the quote from the article, as well as the article itself with a grain of salt. Being "Tier 1" is simply marketing speak.
Re:Small ISPs are the most vulnerable (Score:5, Informative)
As others have noted Sprint was routing Cogent traffic through XO, but Cogent was blackholing the return traffic. Had they updated their BGP the return traffic would have flowed and the end customers would have been unaffected.
Re:Small ISPs are the most vulnerable (Score:5, Informative)
This is not accurate.
When you peer with another network, it goes like this:
1) you only exchange routes for your customers.
2) Your routes should not be visible to the peer through any other transit or peering connections.
So if Sprint and Cogent were just exchanging routes and the peer session was removed, Cogent and Sprint no longer see each other. For them to see each other again to happen, one of them would have to pay someone else for the transit.
Sprint is not going to pay for transit. Cogent doesn't want to, or apparently, they don't even want to to do settlement based peering.
Regulation might be ok if it opened the tier 1 peering to more networks. Forcing large networks to peer with much smaller network is shifting the cost of transporting that traffic long distances to the larger network.
Equal size networks setting up connections in multiple locations should have the same benefit and cost to both networks.
Re:Small ISPs are the most vulnerable (Score:5, Interesting)
You don't seem to understand how peering works. Pushing the Sprint conntent to any of there other peers would have violated there peering agreements and they would not have seen the routes from those peers anyway. The internet only works because all the teir 1's have statement free peering with all the other teir 1's (teir one being the engineering definition of not having any transit links not because the sales guy said so) Transit is when you pay somebody to take your traffic often you cant switch from transit to peering with the same company (if you want ot become a teir 1 you will probably have to pay a 3rd party for transit during the transition). On a peering session you normally only get routes from your peers network and people that are paying them for transit, this means you never get the full 250k or so routes from any one peer.
The tHing you have to realize is every other tier 1 hates cogent, they are one ones that figured out that bandwidth really does not have a high cost if you build out your network smartly. Reliability has it's costs but every carrier has there bad days some more than others. Cogent really only provides service where they can do it cheaply mostly major metro areas especially big shared office buildings. It's dirt cheap bandwidth if you can get it (think $400-1000 for a 100mb connection with no caps etc) and many business are willing to trade some reliability issues with cogent for paying less than there T1 for a pipe 66 times bigger. That being said your silly if cogent or sprint is your only provider.
As a side note this is one of the reasons to avoid tier 1 carriers they are fine if you have at least 2 of them but if you can only have one connection get a tier 2 thats paying 3 or more tier ones for bandwidth and has the capacity to loose any one carrier at any time. As a hint most tier one's have AS numbers below 3k.
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Cogent should have paid their bills when they were notified they did not qualify for settlement free peering.
You say Sprint is wrong. Why should Cogent be allowed to steal service?
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You say Sprint is wrong. Why should Cogent be allowed to steal service?
Why should Sprint be allowed to cut connectivity for their customers, with no advance notice, just because they are unable to resolve a disagreement they have with Cogent?
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Umm... RTFA, Cogent had over a YEAR's notice that they would be cut off.
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Umm... RTFA,
I have. They need to fix their <title>.
Cogent had over a YEAR's notice that they would be cut off.
According to the article, Cogent have been stealing service from Sprint for over a year. However, there is no evidence that Sprint's customers have been informed of the plans to de-peer.
The press release indicates that Sprint have now re-established peering on a temporary basis. To me, that would indicate that Sprint's customers are not amused.
Re:Small ISPs are the most vulnerable (Score:5, Informative)
Uh, because Sprint gave them a free trial then they refused to pay for over a year after they were notified they did not meet free peering requirements? How long can you not pay your bills before you get cut off?
Sprint did not cut off their customers; I am a Sprint customer who gets a full BGP table. I could still see Cogent and their customers through XO, but Cogent was dropping return traffic into a black hole.
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Install a RedHat package mirror on some host that has peering with both networks. Then buy RedHat licenses, but install CentOS to get the best of both worlds: just don't tell RedHat that you're actually using CentOS. (The RedHat Network software management system is one of the single worst things about their OS, that pipeline to their central update is notoriously overwhelmed and awkward to mirror internally, and their package manager ignores locally set preferences for other repositories.)
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No offense, but if your ISP's only upstream is Cogent, you need a better ISP. There is a reason that Cogent is much, much cheaper than the first-rate providers. I know a number of sysadmins that use Cogent, some with gigabit connections. But I don't know anybody serious who depends on them.
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It's common for many smaller ISPs (around here, at least) to start out with a Cogent link until they're large enough to be able to afford being multi-homed. And some of the smaller ISPs offer excellent service, despite being single-homed.
Of course, most of these companies DO throw other providers into the mix as soon as they have enough traffic to be able to make a sufficiently large commit to the second provider to not get charged through the nose per-megabit. But everybody has gotta start somewhere, right
Small ISPs need multihoming anyway (Score:5, Interesting)
If your ISP is only getting its connectivity from Cogent, and isn't homed to multiple upstream ISPs, then they're at risk from any technical problems their Cogent link has as well as from any business problems Cogent has. If they need any regulatory help from the FCC, it's a requirement for Sprint to give them free Clues, not for Sprint to give Cogent free connectivity.
The Internet's a lot more stable than when I got involved with it 25ish years ago, or when small ISPs were a dime a dozen a decade and a bit ago, but it's still not 100% perfect. Back in the mid-90s, small ISPs provided dialup and email service, and they usually bought their first upstream T1 line from the cheapest provider available, but if they stayed up and running for a few months and started to fill it up, they almost universally bought their next upstream T1 from a different provider, because Internet routing flapped all the time, and if you had two providers you were not only less susceptible to your connection failing, you were much less likely to lose connection to half the world whenever a butterfly flapped its wings near MAE-WEST. In fact most ISPs these days can give you a reasonable service level agreement and also a reasonable level of service, but your ISP needs some sort of redundant connection.
Of course, if you think this is a mess, just look at the shape the IPv6 world is in - randomly-connected archipelagos of random little islands, tunnelled together by a maze of twisty little passages.
(Disclaimer: I work for an ISP that's not part of this dispute, but this is entirely my own opinion, not theirs.)
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Typical Cogent (Score:2, Redundant)
Seriously, they are *notorious* for this kind of bullshit. How many bridges do they have left to burn? Not many, I would think. I think they've pissed off all the Tier 1 and Tier 2 providers at this point.
Screw them.
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And yet people still defend Cogent and blame X (where X is whatever company Cogent decided to get uppity with this month).
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Because Cogent charges 1/2 to 1/3 what other bandwidth providers charge. Where else can you get $4/Mb for connectivity? Hell, at that price who cares if you don't get to the entire Internet.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
It's my understanding that the reason that the connections are unbalanced (ie. more traffic flow coming from cogent) is that a major slice of internet porn is hosted on Cogent (due to the low rates). The major telecoms, that host both business and residential customers, have a more balanced traffic pattern. This tight grip they have on two sides of the equation allow them to charge higher rates.
As Sprint and others slowly find out, cog
Customers jumping ship? (Score:5, Insightful)
If I were a Cogent customer and unable to connect to the other half of the internet... I would bail and connect with another company that pays their bills. Contract or not - Cogent wouldn't get a dime from me after this B.S.
Where are the angered masses?
Obvious? (Score:2)
Related stories (Score:3, Funny)
Sprint Cuts Cogent Off the Internet [slashdot.org] 404 comments
Does that mean that /. is using Cogent now?
Looks like it's back up (Score:4, Interesting)
From what it looks like, the peering is back up. Internet Health Report [internetpulse.net]
Sprint has Restored Cogent's Connection (Score:5, Informative)
Not so fast. (Score:5, Interesting)
Cogent is a Tier 1 network service provider (weather or not Sprint and L3 want it to be).
Cogent offers great service at an unbeatable price (4-5 USD per Mbps as opposed to the 15-20 or so Sprint and competitors are charging).
How does Cogent do this? They focused early on metro ethernet services and wave division, instead of wasting money in legacy technologies. They kept their vision clear, and their staff small (under 500 employees).
Cogent is the type of NSP we want as a Tier 1. A very strong backer of Net Neutrality, and no intention of trying to get into the entertainment business unlike Verizon, AT&T, etc. Cogent has a goal of offering the best service at the lowest price (the end result being realistically moving the US forward in terms of available bandwidth).
If you take a look at the CAIDA rankings [http://as-rank.caida.org/], you'll see that Cogent has surpassed Verizon Business (was UUNET) and Global Crossing, and is now right behind Sprint.
Cogent is growing, and if Sprint doesn't do something they're going to loose their no. 3 spot to them. So their strategy is to make a power play and force Cogent into a Tier 2 spot and create uncertainty in the eyes of current and potential customers.
As much as Sprint would like to position itself as a provider for Cogent, it's not. Sprint is a peer for Cogent with Cogent being an equivalent size of the current Sprint network, and larger than many of Sprints other peers.
The idea that Sprint doesn't get as much out of peering with Cogent as Cogent does peering with Sprint is absurd and PR propaganda to try and look like this was anything other than a power-play to keep a competitor at bay.
It will be interesting to see how this goes in court. If I were a Sprint customer I would seriously consider moving to Cogent.
On a side note, Sprint is one of the major opponents against Net Neutrality. Combine that with the fact that Cogent is offering the same level of service for a third the cost, and it's not hard to see why Sprint is trying to take Cogent out of the picture.
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So "great service" == not telling your customers about the impending disconnection from Sprint that Cogent knew about for *months*?
"great service" == not coming up with any mitigation plan for the disconnection?
"great service" == releasing an early press-release that, upon first glance, appears to contain as many lies as it does half-truths?
This is quite a different definition than what i'm used to.
Don't upset the Cartel (Score:3, Interesting)
Sprint and the others hope that the disruptive Cogent would disappear and seem to try to put them down every (legal) chance they get. Cogent tries to make some noise and even the playing field with by going against the telecoms.
I bet most of the people here dissing Cogent are either working for the other Tier 1 players, or are just playing into their hands.
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Uh, you believe that line of bullshit? Shame on the mods for making the parent +5. Settlement-free peering (generally) exists because if two providers were to pay for connections to each other, only exchange/allow internal routes, and the usage was roughly the same both ways, they'd be paying the other the same amount and thus cancel out monetarily.
Sprint and the others hope that the disruptive Cogent would disappear and seem to try to put them down every (legal) chance they get. Cogent tries to make some n
Historical perspective (Score:3, Interesting)
This sort of thing actually seems to go back to the 19th century. After the Treaty of Bern [wikipedia.org] in 1874, mail was exchanged with something like settlement free peering agreements. Apparently this worked for a long time, back when people actually wrote to each other and a letter sent in one direction was likely to result in one sent back the other way.
The system broke down when commercial mail and magazines and such started accounting for more of the volume, and some countries were having to receive (and deliver) much more mail than they sent. In 1969 the system was changed, and now there's a much more complicated inter-country billing system in place.
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If you think the problem is bad, just wait until we've fixed it! (attributed to somebody or other). Think back, carefully. What proposed legislation has ever fixed an extant problem without making something else, and usually the original problem, worse?
Re:Do we need regulation? (Score:4, Insightful)
What proposed legislation has ever fixed an extant problem without making something else, and usually the original problem, worse?
In many European countries, legislation has forced the incumbent telecom operators to allow newcomers to provide the service they were refusing to provide themselves. Probably the most extreme example is that of France, where France Télécom refused to provide ADSL service in order to avoid competing with their profitable ADSL and T1 businesses.
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Any Canadians feeling particularly imperialistic?
Re:Do we need regulation? (Score:5, Insightful)
Two countries sharing a massive border. One has a highly regulated banking sector, one preaches deregulation.
One has a catastrophic banking failure leading to necessary "socialization" of corporate losses. The other has the most stable banking system in the first world.
Screaming "regulation is bad" without considering the situation is duckspeak, and no more intelligent than saying "anything socialist is bad" or "windows is always bad" just because it appears to be a popular viewpoint.
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So why exactly are the interstate highway system, the postal system, and your local fire department "always bad in the long run"?
I suspect that you've been marked as troll, not because of your opion, but because of your total failure to back it up.
What it comes down to is that there is this thing called "market failure". [wikipedia.org] In cases of market failure it makes sense for the gov't to step in and solve the problem. This requires collective ownership of t
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Give it time. I'm sure Cogent's legal department will be quite busy by the end of the week.
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Why would we need regulation? Regulation would end up preventing more peering agreements then helping existing ones over fear of making contracts like this unenforceable. What we should be asking is, did they break their contract, between themselves or with their customers?
We should also be asking what is going wrong on the engineering side if traffic is failing to be routed around it?
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Whose customers? The customers most affected are Cogent's customers, not Sprint's. If Sprint is to be believed, they have plenty of notice to Cogent before they disconnected them. But Cogent clearly failed to notify their customers, or make alternative arrangements.
Did you mean that Sprint should have notified Cogent's customers? How are they supposed to do that?
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that depends on whether you think public good is more important than corporate profit in this situation.
the internet would be quite useless to everyone if major ISPs are always segmenting the internet just so they can extort more money out of their peers.
ISPs are natural monopolies so there's a lot of potential for large ISPs to abuse their power. the bigger you are the more leverage you have to force smaller networks to pay you for peering, even though it's in everyone's best interest for major ISPs to pee
No - Re:Do we need regulation? (Score:2)
Unlike Cogent, who were big enough to get a trial arrangement for free peering with Sprint by asking for it, my web site / hosting service is somewhat smaller (specifically, it's the spare P266 laptop sitting under the desk behind some junk.) But really, I'm just as important to Sprint, because even though I'm not carrying 17% of the US Internet traffic, I also will have a much better traffic ratio - they'll be able to send 3:1 traffic to me, as opposed to Cogent sending them 3:1 or whatever, so clearly it
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Um, how do you connect to the Entire internet? Can you define the internet? (hint, its not a series of tubes). Nobody could ever list that in a contract. I might have connections to L3, att, and cogent, but I can't guarantee that your packet will get through a backbone provider to a server in India. I couldn't even guarantee that the other companies I have connections to will constantly be working, and routing packets..
What does "entire Internet" mean? (Score:3, Insightful)
Assuming Sprint's press release is accurate (which, based on previous juvenile behavior by Cogent, I'm inclined to believe them), Cogent has effectively cut themselves off from the Internet.
Put simply, they've put their AS [wikipedia.org] onto the net without having the necessary routing arrangements in place. They are, at best, a kinda-sorta-maybe-if-you're-lucky part of the Internet right now. They want to be a transit provider without doing the messy stuff like getting contracts in place. Good luck with that.
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You fail at understanding the internet.
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Settlement free peering usually means both parties exchange roughly equal amounts of data. If it's lopsided one way or the other, then they wouldn't qualify in the traditional sense.
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Well, we don't know the terms of the agreement. Perhaps the agreement said that Cogent would either have to terminate the peering or pay for it.
The idea is that Sprint wants Cogent to get the blame. So they will say that Cogent forced them to cut the peering.
We'll only know the truth if the terms of the contract are made public (fat chance) or there's a lawsuit that puts these details in the public record.
FWIW, my position is that enforcing peering traffic volume makes perfect sense. Sprint should not peer