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

  • From: Jeff Shultz
  • Date: Wed Oct 05 15:46:12 2005 
John Payne wrote:

If nobody filtered BGP at all (in or out), you would have the state you are expecting. However, you would have both a capacity problem, and an economic failure, as you may well end up with cogent trying to send all (much) of it's level3 destined traffic through a customer's connection with much smaller pipes... or overloading it's connectivity to one of its other peers. The economic failure comes because now you're expecting a third party to transit packets between cogent and level3 without being paid for it (and some of those connections are metered).

Okay. I always figured that the difference between peering and transit was that you paid for one and not the other. I had no idea that when you bought transit from someone, you weren't automatically buying transit to _all_ of that providers other connections.

Interesting. Balkanization of the Internet anyone? As one other commenter hinted at, it does sound like a recipe for encouraging multi-homing, even at the lowest levels. How many ASN's can the system handle currently?

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Jeff Shultz