The IPv6 Travesty that is Cogent's refusal to peer Hurricane Electric - and how to solve it

Fri Jan 22 10:23:28 UTC 2016

> On Jan 21, 2016, at 10:47 AM, Robert Glover <robertg at garlic.com> wrote:
> 
> On 1/21/2016 10:40 AM, Daniel Corbe wrote:
>>> On Jan 21, 2016, at 1:07 PM, Matthew D. Hardeman <mhardeman at ipifony.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Since Cogent is clearly the bad actor here (the burden being Cogent's to prove otherwise because HE is publicly on record as saying that they’d love to peer with Cogent), I’m giving serious consideration to dropping Cogent come renewal time and utilizing NTT or Zayo instead.
>>> 
>>> While that would not immediately solve the problem that if the NTT or Zayo link went down, single-homed Cogent customers would loose access to me via IPv6, I’m actually ok with that.  It at least lets ensures that when there is a problem, the problem affects only single-home Cogent clients.  Thus, the problem is borne exclusively by the people who pay the bad actor who is causing this problem.  That tends to get uncomfortable for the payee (i.e. Cogent).
>>> 
>>> 
>> Take two transit providers that aren’t in the group of (HE, Cogent).  Cogent is probably banking on this being the response; figuring that they have the financial resources to outlast HE if they’re both shedding customers.
>> 
>> If you really wanted to stick it to Cogent, take 3 transit providers: HE and two of any other providers besides Cogent.
>> 
>> Cogent clearly aren’t going to cave to their own customers asking them to peer with HE.  Otherwise it would have happened by now.
>> 
>> Cogent sucks for lots of reasons and this one isn’t even in the top 5 IMHO.
>> 
>> 
> Let's hear the top 5.   Peering disputes are up there, but what else?
> 
> We've had them as one of our providers going on 8 years, and we can only complain about the occasional peering disputes.

Crazy multihop BGP setups because they don’t do BGP on many (most?) of their customer facing routers?
Frequent outages in many locations (maybe not where you are, seems to be certain problem areas on their network and not others)
Spamtastic sales force?
Overly aggressive sales calls?

I’m sure there are more, but as I’ve never been a Cogent customer (thankfully) due to their history of bad peering policies, peering disputes, generally obnoxious conduct as a company, etc. it is difficult for me to know much about the customer experience beyond what I hear from others, most of whom are former Cogent customers.

Interestingly, when I worked for HE, I wasn’t allowed to speak my mind about Cogent lest it “reflect badly” on HE.

Owen