On 10/28/05 5:45 PM, "JC Dill" <lists05@equinephotoart.com> wrote:
Christopher Woodfield wrote:
"...the companies have agreed to the settlement-free exchange of traffic subject to specific payments if certain obligations are not met."
So it does look like Cogent bent somwhat...I'm guessing they agreed to pay some sort of "traffic imbalance fee"?
There are other possibilities.
Maybe they agreed to pay a transit fee should they fail to carry the L3 user's requested traffic as far as possible before handing it off (cold potato routing) and hand it off at the earliest possibility (hot potato routing) leaving L3 to backhaul it across the L3 network to the user who requested the data.
I doubt it. Cold potato is normally the first thing Cogent offers in a situation like this. I'm guessing this went something beyond that. Cogent would have offered cold potato well before the original depeering. I have no specific information, but I'm guessing there is a per-mbps charge that kicks in at certain ratio levels. Or, there may be a flat "port charge" per month under certain conditions - Sprint did this many years ago.
Etc.
jc
I'm having a bit of trouble figuring out Level(3)'s goal in all this. A bit of incremental revenue? For all of this trouble? I could understand feeling that Cogent's ratios are a violation of their peering requirements and depeering them on principle, but if that's the case, why back down for a little cash? Of course, various external pressures may have been brought to bear on Level(3). Customers, regulators, press, creditors, etc. - Dan