North American Network Operators Group

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Re: Cogent/Level 3 depeering

  • From: Richard A Steenbergen
  • Date: Wed Oct 05 17:48:25 2005

On Wed, Oct 05, 2005 at 03:51:34PM -0400, Patrick W. Gilmore wrote:
> 
> I think you and I have a different definition of "deny" and "decision".
> 
> Cogent was connected to L3.  Level 3 TOOK ACTIVE STEPS to sever that  
> relationship.  Cogent, this moment, has their routers, ports, and  
> configurations ready, willing, and able to accept and send packets to  
> and from L3.
> 
> Please explain to me why you think Cogent is the bad actor here?

At this moment I stand ready willing and able to accept free 
interconnection from L3. If I then ask my transit providers to 
intentionally block announcement of L3 routes so that they are 
unreachable, is it L3's fault that they don't give me free peering?

L3 told them it was coming on August 15th, they had around 50 days of 
notice, and they intentionally decided to remain unreachable in order to 
fight the depeering. Not that it may not have been a perfectly valid play 
on their part to sacrifice current customer happiness for long term 
interconnection capacity and financial viability, but don't make one side 
out to be "evil" and the other "good".

It takes two to tango, and what we have here is two participants who are 
both very willing to make certain the other side in unreachable while 
pointing fingers at the other party for their half of the mess. A more 
honest position would be to man up and say "yes we broke half of the 
connectivity, they broke the other half, and we're going to stay like this 
until someone gives". But then again when has honesty ever been a part of 
marketing?

-- 
Richard A Steenbergen <[email protected]>       http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras
GPG Key ID: 0xF8B12CBC (7535 7F59 8204 ED1F CC1C 53AF 4C41 5ECA F8B1 2CBC)