Re: Sprint v. Cogent, some clarity & facts

* Patrick W. Gilmore · * Mon Nov 03 21:04:36 2008

On Nov 3, 2008, at 8:16 PM, George William Herbert wrote:

Patrick writes:

3. Standard transit contracts do not guarantee full connectivity

If you are a Cogent customer, it is very unlikely your contract will

allow you SLA or other credits for not being able to reach Sprint

unless you negotiated something special. I doubt Sprint's standard

contract is much different. Transit contract SLAs end at AS

boundaries. This is because Network A has no control over Network B

and therefore will not give credit if Network B fails. Of course,
you

can still sue, threaten to terminate, etc., but the letter of the

contract almost certainly says nothing about packets going beyond
your

transit provider's ASN.

I am not aware of any major content provider who still has
any agreements in place that don't say anything about routing
past the provider's network.

Content hosting != transit
Some weren't paying any attention when they signed up initially
and didn't get the specific provisions.  But once bitten by such,
renewals Do Not Happen without additional clauses being inserted.
I don't rule out there still being such agreements, but I think that
anyone with a clue and enough traffic to think about multihoming
has been exposed to this and should have insisted on some legal
protection about best-effort to route to rest of world.  It never
fails to impress me how many people have little clue, though...

"Never underestimate the power of human stupidity."
--
TTFN,
patrick