North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Cogent/Level 3 depeering

  • From: Richard Irving
  • Date: Wed Oct 05 15:04:36 2005 
Todd Vierling wrote:
On Wed, 5 Oct 2005, Matthew Crocker wrote:


I'm curious where in your contract you think Cogent guaranteed you
connectivity to Level 3?

My original contract was with NTT/Verio which Cogent purchased last year when
Verio nuked their Boston POP. I'm having the contract dug out of the
archives to look at what it says. IMHO I pay Cogent for Transit to the whole
Internet, If I wanted partial transit or local peering I would order/contract
and pay for that. Cogent is not currently providing me full transit service.
I really don't care who pulled the plug, it is Cogents job to fix it for me as
I am their customer.

"Isn't BGP supposed to work around this sort of thing?"

This comes down to a little more than just "depeering" -- at least in the
BGP sense. There's active route filtering going on as well if connectivity
is dead; after all, I can bet the house that at least one of Cogent's
network edge peers has connectivity to Level3, and vice versa.

</lurk>
 Maybe not, the depeering L3 is involved in is sort of like blackmail,
we can all thank the indicted ex-CEO of WorldCom, Bernie Ebbers,
for the modern peering "There can only be one" rule set.

  Big guys double dip, and little guys are paying half the big
guys double dip... great deal if you can con someone into
accepting it, or are big enough to -force- them into accepting it.

Case in point.

L3 wants CoGent to kneel, and kiss the ring,
nothing more, nothing less.

 "They must smell blood in the water".


From where I sit, I can see a plethora of routes that transit more than one
tier1. And a few that transit three before hitting the origin. From a
couple locations I see 3356 and 174 visible in *all* paths to the prefixes
containing Level3 and Cogent in the path, respectively.

Well, we know who -your- *transit* providers are....  * cough *
So perhaps the question you should be asking is: Why didn't routes for
these networks fall over to the other upstream peers which *are* capable of
moving the packets? Surely MCI, AT&T, Sprint, and others would carry the
packets to the right place. I can see the paths right here....


Some providers, a legacy of course, are "transit free", and rely on direct routes.. Soon,
there won't be many of these left... and it will be a non-issue.

"There can only be *one* !" - WorldCom chant, Circa 1995.

Most transit contracts only guarantee packet delivery to the edge of their
own networks. I'm pretty sure Cogent is doing that. (Hell, they have lots
of spare capacity now. :)

Most also have a clause to cover the inter-AS links, making sure that they are
not overloaded.

What nature of clause? I consider deliberately filtering prefixes or origin
ASs to be a violation of common backbone BGP use.

Anyone who provides -peering-, instead of transit, actively filters routes, as SOP.

Too bad there aren't Equal Access laws for tier1s. <slyly evil grin>


     Like I said, light a fire, and lets burn Bernie at the stake!

 "I saw him fly up into the sky with the Devil himself !" *

  :-P

 (*  no GOP affiliated ex-CEO's were harmed,
    or -actually- threatened, in the making of this post.
   Like FOX news, this post is classified as "Entertainment"
    and may or may not accurately portray actual facts..  ;-)

<lurk>