Patrick writes:
3. Standard transit contracts do not guarantee full connectivity If you are a Cogent customer, it is very unlikely your contract will allow you SLA or other credits for not being able to reach Sprint unless you negotiated something special. I doubt Sprint's standard contract is much different. Transit contract SLAs end at AS boundaries. This is because Network A has no control over Network B and therefore will not give credit if Network B fails. Of course, you can still sue, threaten to terminate, etc., but the letter of the contract almost certainly says nothing about packets going beyond your transit provider's ASN.
I am not aware of any major content provider who still has any agreements in place that don't say anything about routing past the provider's network. Some weren't paying any attention when they signed up initially and didn't get the specific provisions. But once bitten by such, renewals Do Not Happen without additional clauses being inserted. I don't rule out there still being such agreements, but I think that anyone with a clue and enough traffic to think about multihoming has been exposed to this and should have insisted on some legal protection about best-effort to route to rest of world. It never fails to impress me how many people have little clue, though... -george william herbert gherbert@retro.com