On Oct 5, 2005, at 12:12 PM, Mike Tancsa wrote:

At 02:47 PM 05/10/2005, Douglas Dever wrote:

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fact remains that Cogent is not providing the service I'm paying them for and they need to get it fixed.

Really? As you already pointed out, your packets are reaching their destination. So, they don't "need" to get anything "fixed."

I think what people are upset about is that you now have less redundancy now if you are a cogent transit customer. If I tell my customers, "I have 3 full transit links", I now have to put an * there. If my 2 non cogent links go down, I dont have a full visibility of the Internet. I see everything, except Level3. It becomes more acute if you have just 2 transit links-- Cogent and one other. What if your other provider has a lossy path to Level 3 ? You cant work around it by preferencing 174 3356

---Mike

You have always needed that asterisk, the only thing that changes is the scale of things... "3 full transit links" is really only marketing speak, the same thing applies to "the full Internet" and "Tier <anything>". I run Billy_Bobs_Florist.com[0]. Lets say I filter all routes from your provider, or just your routes (don't ask me why, it's my network...). Are you going to go after your provider and demand credit from them because I have chosen to ignore some routes? No? But now you no longer have "the full Internet"... Or I run some huge "Tier 1" (shudders) and all of the fiber to Singapore (on someone else's network) gets cut. You can no longer reach "the full Internet" - do I owe you money? Ok, how about the only T1 to some site that you feel like browsing to goes down? Now do I owe you credit? But you no longer have "the full Internet", nor "full routes". Or lets say I run "Billy Bob ISP" ( a small ISP that buys connectivity from only one place, ISP_X). You are a customer of ISP_X and I now sell you a circuit and give you full tables (from my view). Do you really have n + 1 "full transit links" now? When you buy connectivity from a provider the only thing that you really get any guarantee on is whatever is written on your contract - and I would be very surprised if it says anything about reaching all hosts connected to the Internet at all times[1]. Sure you have some expectations of what they will provide (full tables will be some large number of routes, they connect to a bunch of other networks, they don't filter port 80 (or anything else for that matter)), but unless your contract actually specifies all of this, you are on your own. But don't worry, you do have some power in all this - you can vote with your wallet... Warren. [0] Ok, so I don't really, but.... [1] If it does, I want whoever wrote your contract working for me.... -- There are only 10 types of people in this world -- those who understand binary arithmetic and those who don't.