IPv6 internet broken, cogent/telia/hurricane not peering

Mon Oct 12 19:41:15 UTC 2009

Igor Ybema wrote:
> I recently noticed that there seems a peering issue on the ipv6 internet.
> As we all know hurricane is currently the largest ipv6 carrier. Other large
> carriers are now implementing ipv6 on their networks, like Cogent and Telia.
> 
> However, due to some politics it seems that they are not peering with each
> other resulting in a broken ipv6 internet currently. I noticed this by using
> the looking glasses from telia and hurricane.

I'll spell it out for your entertainment.

Hurricane aggressively tries to solve connectivity problems, IPv4 or IPv6.

In the case of Cogent, they hilariously are trying to reduce peering 
with Hurricane over time.

Hurricane has IPv4 peering with Cogent.  Years ago this was at four 
locations in the world, then this was at three locations in the world, 
then two locations in the world.  Why?  Because over time when a BGP 
session would go down for longer than 30 seconds, Cogent permanently 
shut the session.  Both Cogent and Hurricane have progressively lowered 
the local preference and otherwise filtered the routes we receive from 
each other to prevent the connections from saturating due to the size of 
our networks and the number of prefixes we each announce.

These connections were a combination of OC12s in the US and public 
peering in Europe.  Hurricane repeatedly over the years has pushed to 
replace the OC12s with atleast giges (if not 10GE), on the principle it 
would be cheaper, conform to more of the hardware each of us uses, allow 
us to remove legacy OC12 cards from the network, etc.  Cogent hasn't.

Why?

Because even though they are content heavy and due to the routing tables 
one might infer they don't have settlement free peering with all 
networks, they don't want to help Hurricane in any way.

Ok, fine.  Not everybody choses to operate their network this way, 
usually most are more concerned about their customers, however hey who 
am I to say whatever they view as their core mission isn't being met.

If you've been around long enough, you'd know that normally nobody talks 
about peering publicly like this.  Most of the core network operators 
here could just infer what I told you above.

Then why would I write this post?

Because I want to set the record straight regarding Hurricane Electric's 
IPv6 peering goals, and nothing in Cogent's case seems to get through to 
them.

Oh, BTW, let me describe the special case of irony.  If Cogent wanted to 
ensure they weren't in a subservient role in IPv6 as they are for IPv4 
(and I'm not talking about Hurricane, I'm talking about all the networks 
they've ever had to pay or fight in one way or another), then they would 
be working to have a complete IPv6 table by working with a player like 
Hurricane which reduces their dependency on networks that will be 
difficult with them, that is: be cooperative with them rather than give 
them a huge amount of crap and try to torture them at each turn (i.e. in 
order to get "peering" you need to buy these local loops, etc etc etc).

BTW, regarding the comments about 6to4, with Hurricane Electric you will 
reach more of the IPv6 Internet, with lower latency than anybody else.

> I already asked hurricane about their point of view. They simply just ignore
> it because they 'are the biggest one'.

We don't ignore comments about connectivity, in fact quite the opposite. 
  We study each AS and which ASes are behind them.  We work on getting 
peering with the specific AS, in the case that they are unresponsive, 
getting the ASes behind them.

Among the things we do to discuss peering: send email to any relevant 
contacts, call them, contact them on IRC, send people to the relevant 
conferences to seek them out specifically, send people to their offices, 
etc.

So far we stop short of baking cakes, but hey...

Our goal is to provide as much connectivity to as many people as possible.

That might be our goal, however, not everybody's goal on the Internet is 
to provide as much connectivity as possible for their customers.

Mike.