I really doubt Sprint's purpose here is to "hurt the Internet" or to harm Cogent either in terms of costs or reputation. Here are my views on the topic: Every time Cogent gets de-peered (at least 5 times now since 2003), this discussion comes up again and it seems that some people forget (or don't know) how many times it's happened to them before. There must be a reason it keeps happening, right? Are there any other large ISPs that have had this type of problem 5 times? As someone was saying earlier, in the PSTN world carriers generally pay for every call terminated to another carrier's network and pay each other back and forth. In IP peering, these types of costs are "eliminated" by settlement-free peering relationships where carriers feel there is a benefit to do so. These are relationships or contracts between the two carriers, and most of us have no idea how these are written or what clauses are included about how and when one carrier can end that contract. Regardless of the exact terms, there will certainly be actions or other situations that would be viewed as a breach of contract, resulting in ending or changing the relationship. In the case of Cogent, they seem to want to be a Tier 1 carrier (usually loosely defined as an carrier that does not pay for transit or access from/to any other carrier), but they are not usually considered one by many in the industry. Technically at this point they are not since they are believed to pay Level 3 and Sprint. Now I really can't speak to exactly why each carrier that has de-peered Cogent in the past has done so, but based on conversations I've had with higher-ups at one of these ISPs, their major issue with Cogent was a huge discrepancy in the volume of inbound vs. outbound traffic. To that carrier, based on the traffic patterns, they believed that Cogent should be paying for their connections and was not keeping to the spirit of their relationship or breaking the contract if there was one. They supposedly attempted for some time to resolve the issue amicably, but when that failed they chose to take action as a last chance to resolve the dispute to their liking. Now as to the "harmful" effect to Cogent's customers, that effect would be easily mitigated if Cogent would choose to buy transit from any other ISP. Instead, they try to avoid that by offering affected customers free circuits for some period of time, which hopefully turn into paying customers at a later date. Also, anyone running any important site or network knows never to be single-homed, and therefore should not be effected in the long run. Anyone single homed accepts the risks associated with that by not having redundant connections, especially if that single home is Cogent based on their history of peering arguments. So based on that the only "difference" I'd expect this to make is in the relationship between Sprint and Cogent in the future. I doubt this will change Sprint's, Cogent's, or any other ISP's corporate views/policies on peering in the long term. Just my 2 cents, -Scott -----Original Message----- From: Matthew Moyle-Croft [mailto:mmc@internode.com.au] Sent: Saturday, November 01, 2008 10:07 PM To: bas Cc: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: Sending vs requesting. Was: Re: Sprint / Cogent bas wrote:
Why does everyone keep referring to traffic flows as sendng? In this case it's not as if Cogent just randomly sends data to Sprint.
I think it's a really odd reinterpretation of telephony concepts. In telephony interconnects are typically settlement based, sender pays receiver, in the settlement based world it seems to have gotten confused. I'm still trying to come to terms with what Sprint is trying to achieve here. I can only assume it's (and I'm stealing from Vijay here) to raise Cogent's cost of doing business by forcing them to do settlement based or paid peering and thus trying to force the cost of their transit to rise. Maybe it's to damage Cogent's reputation as well? The cost of doing this seems to be high (ie. upsetting high paying (single homed) transit and mobile customers) and getting negative media coverage. Is this really going to make a substantial kind of difference? MMC -- Matthew Moyle-Croft - Internode/Agile - Networks