AOL & Cogent

Sun Dec 29 20:57:38 UTC 2002

Basil,

If you recall, we talked about purchasing cogent access from you quite
some time ago, as Five Elements is also in the Switch & Data facility. 
If you need somewhere to off-load your AOL-bound traffic, we have some
excess Aleron transit, and they have AOL peering of some sort right in
Chicago.  As we have excess capacity right now we could do it for a cost
that would be similar to your cogent cost on a month-to-month basis,
provided it does not exceed 40Mb/sec or so, and we'll let you know when
our excess starts to run out and we start to incur cost on it.  Most
likely, by that time the Cogent/AOL issue will be resolved anyway, but
it protects us from getting into a long-term deal selling below cost,
while allowing you to improve network performance while maintaining your
current cost structure as long as we have excess that we have to pay
for, anyway.  I'm not trying to "pitch" you, just help out :-)

Here is a traceroute from the router we could put you on.  I have a free
100baseT port, or we could put you on a switch if you don't mind.

root at mr0.chcgil1:~$ traceroute -q1 www.atdn.net # us in switch & data
traceroute to atdn.net (64.12.181.62) from 199.166.200.16, 30 hops max,
38 byte packets
 1  gige2.mr0.chcgil2.ings.com (199.166.200.2)  0.341 ms # us in equinix
 2  ge3-7.as.eqxchiil.aleron.net (205.198.16.141)  0.403 ms
 3  ge6-2.ar.eqxchiil.aleron.net (205.198.16.41)  0.365 ms
 4  66.185.141.105 (66.185.141.105)  23.778 ms # first AOL TDN hop
 5  66.185.148.66 (66.185.148.66)  24.009 ms
 6  bb2-vie-P10-0.atdn.net (66.185.152.215)  24.041 ms
 7  bb2-rtc-P0-2.atdn.net (66.185.152.116)  24.110 ms
 8  bb2-mtc-P8-0.atdn.net (66.185.152.100)  24.661 ms
 9  pop1-mtc-P12-0.atdn.net (66.185.143.195)  24.810 ms
10  ow1-mc1-so-0-0-0.atdn.net (66.185.143.202)  24.839 ms
11  172.20.148.22 (172.20.148.22)  25.150 ms
12  172.20.148.22 (172.20.148.22)  25.048 ms !A

I hope you don't mind my inquiry.  Drop us a line if you think we can
help provide a stop-gap measure for the Cogent/AOL thing, or whatnot.

--
Jeff S Wheeler <jsw at five-elements.com>

On Sat, 2002-12-28 at 21:24, Basil Kruglov wrote:
> 
> Speaking of this whole Cogent/AOL/Level3 mess.. sigh.
> 
> I got tired of trying getting anything out of Cogent. So, here's list of
> questions perhaps someone might be able to answer.
> 
> 1. I'm sure some of you are customers of Level3, and I'm sure
> you do see 1-2 sec latency w/ Cogent, what's the official Level3 'position'
> if/when you contact them? Do they have any plans upgrading capacity with 
> Cogent, what's their side of this story in general?
> 
> 
> 2. I think I asked this before, why wouldn't Cogent prepend 
> customer prefixes to Level3 or set BGP4 community for multihomed sites,
> homed w/ Cogent + someone else. 
> 
> (This is to control inbound, and please don't go into "this is not-standard
> and Cogent won't do it".)
> 
> 
> 3. Did anyone suggested to Cogent to carry traffic (or some portion of it)
> to AOL via MFN to offload its Level3 peering? I couldn't get any straight
> answer from Cogent why this can't be done.
> 
> 
> 4. And another interesting perspective... I'm sure NDAs on peering are
> involved, but anyhow -some of us don't really care about AOL that
> much, assuming it is only outbound from Cogent into AOL (via Level3) that is
> saturated, Cogent may try to push traffic as:
> 
> 16631_174_3356_ excluding AOL' ASN(s) at one peering location
> 
> and keep saturating its Level3 peering connectivity at other locations. Any
> thoughts?
> 
> -Basil
> 