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Re: Cogent/Level 3 depeering

  • From: Micheal Patterson
  • Date: Wed Oct 05 17:32:41 2005



----- Original Message ----- From: "Jeff Shultz" <[email protected]>
To: "Simon Lockhart" <[email protected]>
Cc: "NANOG list" <[email protected]>
Sent: Wednesday, October 05, 2005 2:35 PM
Subject: Re: Cogent/Level 3 depeering


Simon Lockhart wrote:
Yes, it could have - I'm led to believe that one of the parties does purchase
transit. However, moving all that traffic over transit rather than peering
would cost them a significant amount of money - and as they're running their
transit service at extremely low cost, they probably would find it hard to
fund the use of transit to reach the other party.

Simon
Okay, here is how I see this war... which seems to be the proper term for it.

1. Level 3 is probably annoyed at Cogent for doing the extremely low cost transit thing, thus putting price pressures on other providers - including them. So they declared war.

2. Level 3's assault method is to drop peering with Cogent, in hopes this will force Cogent to purchase transit to them in some fashion (does Level 3 have an inflated idea of their own worth?), also forcing them to raise prices and hopefully (for Level 3) returning some stability to the market.

3. Cogent's counter-attack is to instead offer free transit to all single homed Level 3 customers instead, effectively stealing them (and their revenue) from Level 3... and lowering the value of Level 3 service some amount as well.

4. Next move, if they choose to make one, is Level 3's.

Fun. I think I'll stay in the trenches.

--
Jeff Shultz

Could be that a bilateral peer contract isn't being fulfilled and L3 got tired of taking the full load of the traffic. PSInet killed the peer with C&W for that very reason, regardless of what was told to the general public about it years ago. C&W simply wouldn't provision their peering OC3 so PSINet killed theirs. Without know all sides of this one, and having access to the router configs at each side, no one will be able to really say who's breaking routing or who's got an active acl up and who doesn't. Traffic flow is apparently still broken otherwise, with these two peering as they do with over tier 1's, bgp should have settled the problem as intended. My guess is that either one or even both sides may still have active static routes in place breaking bgp routing.

--

Micheal Patterson
Senior Communications Systems Engineer
405-917-0600

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