Peering Disputes Migrate To IPv6 111
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."
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.
The Cake is... (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:Uh huh (Score:5, Informative)
It's so delicious and moist! :-)
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:Growing Trend... (Score:3, Informative)
“we stop short of baking cakes” to encourage peering. That got the ball rolling.
Re:Could someone elaborate? (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.renesys.com/blog/2005/12/peering_the_fundamental_archit.shtml
Re:Oh great, Cogent is at it again (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. Lets say BigPornSite uses SuperCheapISP (eg Cogent) to reach their customers: BigPornSite is located on the west coast, but most of their viewers aren't. BigPornSite will hand off their traffic to SuperCheapISP in the west-coast data center, and SuperCheapISP will route the traffic to the viewer's ISP. (Let's say its Comcast...) However, if the Comcast customer is located on the East coast, Comcast is stuck paying for the coast-to-coast transport instead of SuperCheapISP.
So, SuperCheapISP got paid by the porn site to route the traffic for maybe 100m or so, and gets rid of it as soon as they can. Would you want to sign a peering agreement with them, knowing that they're going to dump tons of traffic on your network with no regards to where its actually going? Yes, it's silly, but there's a precedent here. Ratio limits are in place to protect against tricks like this.
Re:Seen before with Cogent/Sprint (Score:1, Informative)
The problem is hot-potato routing, and the fact that cogent (anyone, really) will push that traffic out of their network and into someone else's over the peering point as soon as possible.
If they held the packet for as much as they possible could in their network, the tale would be different. But that's not easy to do, and generally not done anyway except in very, VERY specific situations.
So, the peering agreements among such networks really have to try to strike a balance of in/out traffic, and either terminate the peering or require compensation from the party that PRODUCES most of the traffic to the one that has to RECEIVE most of that traffic. It *really* is all about hot-potato routing.