OpenTransit (france telecom) depeers cogent

Fri Apr 15 02:12:36 UTC 2005

This is part of the game.

Party A depeers Party B. Party B has received 30 to 60 days notification.
That gives party B enough time to do one of two things.

1) They can ensure they have sufficient transit and/or peering with Party
A's customers to ensure that all packets will be delivered. They can make
sure that they are seeing all of A's routes through those other networks.
This is what's called "being good to your customers"

2) They can take the time to put measures in place to punish party A. Things
like route filters to make sure that the only places A gets B's routes are
through the (soon to be gone) direct peering. Things like canceling or
turning down enough transit so they can claim they CAN'T send the traffic
anywhere else. Things like filtering out A's routes from their upstream's
BGP feeds. This is called "try to inflict enough pain to effect a reversal"

#2 is the stand-off scenario. The next step is, will party B keep up their
fortress defense or go home? Will party A back down and turn the peering
back up? How long can party B go without their customers canceling?

Much of this depends on the relative size of A and B, as well as their
customer mixes. If party B is a small porn hoster and party A is a big
broadband ISP, then A has nothing to worry about - evidence suggests there
won't be many complaints. Customers will be upset, but they won't complain.

If party B is hosting something more socially acceptable (if equally
pointless) like fantasy football or a popular Everquest server, well, things
just got dicey for party A. Party A may just back down.

Game theory is fun, folks! With real money on the line, its also very
interesting.

- Dan

On 4/14/05 5:46 PM, "Stephen J. Wilcox" <steve at telecomplete.co.uk> wrote:

> 
> On Thu, 14 Apr 2005, Patrick W Gilmore wrote:
> 
>> 
>> On Apr 14, 2005, at 5:16 PM, Richard A Steenbergen wrote:
>> 
>>>> Surely FT's customers pay for access to Cogents network and vice
>>>> versa?
>>> 
>>> In such a case, FT has done its part by paying Sprint for full transit
>>> service. It is Cogent who is not accepting the route from their
>>> transit,
>>> and who intentionally does not carry the global routing table. If I
>>> put up
>>> a filter on my transit that says I will not accept routes from you
>>> unless
>>> you peer with me, should your customers leave you because I did this?
>>> Doesn't sound very fair to me. I guess it depends how important I am,
>>> doesn't it?
>> 
>> Is Cogent filtering the prefixes they get from Verio?  Or is Verio
>> filtering what they send to Cogent?  Does it matter?
>> 
>> I think you have a very good point - FT is buying full transit.  Cogent
>> is the one without full reachability.
>> 
>> Doesn't mean that FT didn't know this would be a problem when they took
>> the step, though.
> 
> Well, FT took the step as you say.. they are the instigator here.
> 
> But, they are in their right to do so and would have given proper written
> notice 
> to Cogent so this isnt as much a surprise to them as is being suggested
> either.
> 
> Steve
> 

-- 
Daniel Golding
Network and Telecommunications Strategies
Burton Group