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."
by Anonymous Coward
on Friday October 23, @04:32PM (#29851961)
That's kind of technical, so I'm most of slashdot doesn't understand. To put it in terms you would understand:
You're a gay dude. You like to top and you like to bottom. You hook up with another dude, but he doesn't want to bottom, he only wants to top. As much as you love dick in your ass, you want to fuck his ass too.
Your bisexual male friend (who happens to be a car) wants to play with your girlfriend (who is also a car?). BUT he wont let you play with his (multiple) girlfriends, err.. sorry, cars. They're bored and don't get any while he plays away. In fact, I can think of a few situations like this in real life, too!! Wierd but accurate. Not posted AC..., girls with guts on Slashdot, scary eh?? Guys, run awaaaayyy!
It had to happen that this would be posted when the article went up. It's done now. We can avoid any more Portal references for the rest of the discussion.
We can avoid any more Portal references for the rest of the discussion.
Yes, now we can get back to the simpsons references, notifications of not being a lawyer, car metaphors, MS bashing, and the inevitable hitler reference.
On the other hand, I believe a highly motivated slashdotter can complete a thread without godwining while enduring the most intense physical pain.
"The IT Center reminds you that the Beige IPv6 Router cannot speak. In the event that the Beige IPv6 Router does speak, the IT Center urges you to disregard it's advice."
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?
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.
Or rust belt servers that still have some useful life in them and no real demand for IPv6.
Why buy expensive new kit when the old stuff still lights up.
A public dispute is better then a 'no' you dont need it, we will upgrade when IPv6 is hyped and cheap.
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.
That is true and quite silly all at once. Given network A and B with where B is full of servers that want to serve content (and ads of course) and A is full of clients that want to view that content, both networks have been paid by their customers to complete those transactions and both are failing to honor their agreements if they don't do it.
On one hand, I see what you mean about it always being Cogent involved, but at the same time they undercut prices on all of the networks that have de-peered them, so
That is true and quite silly all at once. Given network A and B with where B is full of servers that want to serve content (and ads of course) and A is full of clients that want to view that content, both networks have been paid by their customers to complete those transactions and both are failing to honor their agreements if they don't do it.
That's true; however, for an ISP there is more to it than that. Depending on which POP generates the traffic, and which one sinks it, hot-potato routing can be unfair
Mod parent up. People are wanting 'something for nothing' again. I also take offense to HE's comments about "caring about their customers being the most important thing" implying Cogent doesn't. I'm not fan of Cogent, but hell HE, if you care about your customers spend the money and get proper peeing agreements setup instead of blaming the other guy for not wanting to service your customers for free.
I'm not fan of Cogent, but hell HE, if you care about your customers spend the money and get proper peeing agreements setup instead of blaming the other guy for not wanting to service your customers for free.
I am sorry and normally the last person to call other slashdoters out on a typo but this one was just to funny.... I'm not fan of Cogent, but hell HE, if you care about your customers spend the money and get proper peeing agreements setup instead of blaming the other guy for not wanting to service your customers for free.
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.
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.
[Hurricane Electric] are the Wal-Mart of bandwidth and offer dirt-cheap prices. [...] how dare they expect to offer the same QoS and not pay for it.
Huh? You meant that there are operators that offer actual QoS for IP traffic? If so, it's an interesting new research result, and I'd like to see the technology.
(More seriously -- unless you can show us that HE's SLA is significantly worse than other operators', I recommend that you shut up. What you're doing is called uninformed FUD.)
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.
Actually no, it was because HE's Leber mentioned on NANOG the following: “we stop short of baking cakes” to encourage peering. That got the ball rolling.
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?
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.
The following is copied from a previous Cogent/Spint debacle posting:
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 analogy doesn't work though, because no matter how much traffic there is or how unbalanced it may be, every last bit of it represents a peer on one network that has paid for connectivity with the other network. Every meg Cogent shoveled through the peering point only went there because a customer of the other network wanted his porn from a server on Cogent's network.
I won't say that Cogent is in any way, shape or form perfect. They could stand to improve a LOT in many areas. But then, the same is true of every transit provider.
Uh huh (Score:5, Funny)
I think we all know about the cake...
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I think we all know about the cake...
It's full of strippers?
Re:Uh huh (Score:5, Funny)
It's full of strippers?
Yahoo!
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
What? Just let'em eat it?
Re:Uh huh (Score:5, Informative)
It's so delicious and moist! :-)
Parent
analogy (Score:5, Informative)
You're a gay dude. You like to top and you like to bottom. You hook up with another dude, but he doesn't want to bottom, he only wants to top. As much as you love dick in your ass, you want to fuck his ass too.
Hope that helps.
Re:analogy (Score:5, Informative)
As much of a troll as this may have been, it was, sadly, a very accurate analogy of a relationship with Cogent.
Parent
Re:analogy (Score:5, Funny)
Can someone give me that as an analogy with bi-curious cars instead?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Your bisexual male friend (who happens to be a car) wants to play with your girlfriend (who is also a car?). BUT he wont let you play with his (multiple) girlfriends, err.. sorry, cars. They're bored and don't get any while he plays away. In fact, I can think of a few situations like this in real life, too!! Wierd but accurate. Not posted AC..., girls with guts on Slashdot, scary eh?? Guys, run awaaaayyy!
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
If you didn't have guts, you would be some sort of person that is all hollow in the inside. That is the stuff of nightmares.
ob. (Score:3, Funny)
THE CAKE IS A LIE!
Re:ob. (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:ob. (Score:5, Funny)
This unfair to Cogent. They are obviously only doing what they must, because they can, for the good of all of us.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Except the ones who are dead.
Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)
Yes, I think we can all be glad we got that out of our systems.
By the way, did I hear someone say that the IPv6 peering agreement was moist and delicious?
Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)
Oh come on. Just because you're no fun, doesn't mean we aren't.
Re: (Score:2)
We can avoid any more Portal references for the rest of the discussion.
Yes, now we can get back to the simpsons references, notifications of not being a lawyer, car metaphors, MS bashing, and the inevitable hitler reference.
On the other hand, I believe a highly motivated slashdotter can complete a thread without godwining while enduring the most intense physical pain.
Okay, NOW the portal references are done.
Re: (Score:3)
"The IT Center reminds you that the Beige IPv6 Router cannot speak. In the event that the Beige IPv6 Router does speak, the IT Center urges you to disregard it's advice."
Re: (Score:2)
Too bad the cake also has a typo... too bad they don't make a spell checker that supports the ICING standard.
The Cake is... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:The Cake is... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Um... that's TFA. It wasn't hard to find. :/
That's ok. I actually clicked on the link the OP posted.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Um... that's TFA. It wasn't hard to find. :/
It's in TFA: it has been empirically demonstrated that accessing it is impossible for most people commenting.
Re: (Score:2)
They misspelled "Please" on the cake. Pitiful.
Maybe Cogent is just holding out for a peer that can spell at the 3rd-grade level.
Oh great, Cogent is at it again (Score:4, Interesting)
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: (Score:2)
Well... if you combine being a bully, and the behavior that psychology calls "reflectance"...
Re:Oh great, Cogent is at it again (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Why buy expensive new kit when the old stuff still lights up.
A public dispute is better then a 'no' you dont need it, we will upgrade when IPv6 is hyped and cheap.
Re:Oh great, Cogent is at it again (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That is true and quite silly all at once. Given network A and B with where B is full of servers that want to serve content (and ads of course) and A is full of clients that want to view that content, both networks have been paid by their customers to complete those transactions and both are failing to honor their agreements if they don't do it.
On one hand, I see what you mean about it always being Cogent involved, but at the same time they undercut prices on all of the networks that have de-peered them, so
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
That's true; however, for an ISP there is more to it than that. Depending on which POP generates the traffic, and which one sinks it, hot-potato routing can be unfair
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not fan of Cogent, but hell HE, if you care about your customers spend the money and get proper peeing agreements setup instead of blaming the other guy for not wanting to service your customers for free.
I am sorry and normally the last person to call other slashdoters out on a typo but this one was just to funny....
I'm not fan of Cogent, but hell HE, if you care about your customers spend the money and get proper peeing agreements setup instead of blaming the other guy for not wanting to service your customers for free.
I wouldn't peer with HE either.... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
and their pricing
http://www.internode.on.net/business/web_hosting/business_web_hosting/pricing/ [on.net]
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
[Hurricane Electric] are the Wal-Mart of bandwidth and offer dirt-cheap prices. [...] how dare they expect to offer the same QoS and not pay for it.
Huh? You meant that there are operators that offer actual QoS for IP traffic? If so, it's an interesting new research result, and I'd like to see the technology.
(More seriously -- unless you can show us that HE's SLA is significantly worse than other operators', I recommend that you shut up. What you're doing is called uninformed FUD.)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Ah, so you're slandering them for competitive reasons, then.
Would I be an awful person... (Score:4, Funny)
Growing Trend... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
“we stop short of baking cakes” to encourage peering. That got the ball rolling.
Transition going well... (Score:3, Insightful)
Go peer with google instead (Score:2, Interesting)
They've already bought loads of dark fibre, maybe they'd be interested in getting a controlling stake in IPv6 early on.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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? (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.renesys.com/blog/2005/12/peering_the_fundamental_archit.shtml
Seen before with Cogent/Sprint (Score:5, Informative)
The following is copied from a previous Cogent/Spint debacle posting:
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.
Re:Seen before with Cogent/Sprint (Score:4, Insightful)
The analogy doesn't work though, because no matter how much traffic there is or how unbalanced it may be, every last bit of it represents a peer on one network that has paid for connectivity with the other network. Every meg Cogent shoveled through the peering point only went there because a customer of the other network wanted his porn from a server on Cogent's network.
I won't say that Cogent is in any way, shape or form perfect. They could stand to improve a LOT in many areas. But then, the same is true of every transit provider.
Parent