Cogent/Level 3 depeering

Wed Oct 5 18:46:20 UTC 2005

At 01:49 PM 10/5/2005, Matthew Crocker wrote:

>>So perhaps the question you should be asking is:  Why didn't routes
>>for
>>these networks fall over to the other upstream peers which *are*
>>capable of
>>moving the packets?  Surely MCI, AT&T, Sprint, and others would
>>carry the
>>packets to the right place.  I can see the paths right here....
>
>
>They did, and I'm not down.  I see Level 3 via Sprint and GNAPs/CENT
>just fine.  I didn't lose any connectivity to Level 3 at all.  Bits
>moving down different pipes, not a big deal to me technically.

Unless you had an outage of both your Sprint and GNAPS circuits, at 
which point it'd be a REALLY big deal.

I've got two upstreams, with Cogent being one of them. I'm getting 
L(3) through my other, but if the other were to drop, I would not 
have routes to L(3). Just how many links should an edge provider need 
to buy to ensure uninterrupted service in the event of a circuit 
failure? Two used to be enough if reasonably chosen.

>   The
>fact remains that Cogent is not providing the service I'm paying them
>for and they need to get it fixed.  If that means  picking up transit
>from another Tier 1 to get to Level 3 or making amends with Level 3
>to get the existing peering working again.  It doesn't matter to me,
>I just don't like paying for stuff I'm not getting. In the grand
>scheme of things I'm paying  A LOT for my Cogent bandwidth (it
>started off as Verio remember).

I have the same concern. I'm buying transit from Cogent. I'm sure the 
Cogent marketing materials did sell this on the basis of it covering 
traffic anywhere on the Internet, whether the fine print of the 
contract did or not.

>>What nature of clause?  I consider deliberately filtering prefixes
>>or origin
>>ASs to be a violation of common backbone BGP use.
>>
>>Too bad there aren't Equal Access laws for tier1s.  <slyly evil grin>
>
>Ewww,  I'll put up with these occasional pissing matches and build
>around them to avoid any government regulations.

So the edge providers either suffer, or spend a lot on lawyers to add 
penalty clauses to contracts for when their upstreams get in pissing 
matches with other backbones. Not fun either way.