As much as we blame Cogent and Sprint for breaking the internet, I also have no sympathy for individual single-homed downstream customers on either networks. If you are complaining about Sprint<->Cogent depeering and have customers demanding for your mission-critical services, then you are just as negligent to not have multihomed before all of this happened. If you need that 100% uptime guarantee, you shouldn't rely on single carrier, nor should you rely on government for more regulation. No one can help you but yourself in ensuring your uptime-- so perhaps look at your own setup and decide that you need that 2nd connection to back you up when first one fails. This is a simple business logic.
Is it just me, or is this awful logic? Really, we DO NOT WANT every site that considers itself to have "mission critical needs" to be multihomed. This would lead to an explosion in the size of the routing table. When two "Tier 1 Wannabes" get into a peering dispute and start deliberately breaking reachability, this is an artifically-generated crisis. It certainly strikes me that someone here isn't making "best-effort" attempts to supply Internet access. One would wish that the customers of that guilty party have contracts which require "best-effort" attempts to provide Internet access, which would mean that a peering spat that results in visible traffic failures ought to open the door for customers to migrate ... elsewhere. Of course, while that might be fair, it isn't compatible with the real world. However, requiring everyone to get a second Internet connection is not realistic. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.