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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Cogent/Level 3 depeering
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.Is this wrong? Two sides: a) cogent is directly responsible for the accelerated pace of transit pricing errosion, by almost an order of magnitude when they started. b) perhaps someone else would have done it? 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.I think I'd bet that if L3 depeered Cogent, the last place cogent would go to buy transit to L3 would be L3. 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.This is a free enterprise machine we live in. I laud Cogent for this action. It shows chutzpah (see: cajones). I agree with the Honorable Mr. Steenbergen. I will be watching http://finance.yahoo.com/q/sec?s=LVLT4. Next move, if they choose to make one, is Level 3's. It will be fun, until the point at which this happens, and the depeered sues the depeeree. It will then become further fun when a unwise, uneducated judge in a court of equity will enter a status-quo injunction, forcing the two parties to peer.Fun. I think I'll stay in the trenches. Tis what we need: court enforced peering. I can't imagine how this could happen, however. (please be sure you detected the sarcasm in the last statement). -- Alex Rubenstein, AR97, K2AHR, [email protected], latency, Al Reuben Net Access Corporation, 800-NET-ME-36, http://www.nac.net
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