Cogent/Level 3 depeering

Wed Oct 5 20:11:54 UTC 2005

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Daniel Roesen" <dr at cluenet.de>
To: <nanog at nanog.org>
Sent: Wednesday, October 05, 2005 2:11 PM
Subject: Re: Cogent/Level 3 depeering

>
> On Wed, Oct 05, 2005 at 02:08:01PM -0400, Richard A Steenbergen wrote:
>> You can only be a "tier 1" and maintain global reachability if you peer
>> with every other tier 1. Level 3 is obviously the real thing, and Cogent
>> is "close enough" (at least in their own minds :P) that they won't buy
>> real transit, only spot routes for the few things that they are missing
>> (ATDN and Sprint basically). There is no route "filtering" going on, only
>> the lack of full propagation due to transit purchasing decisions, or in
>> this case the lack thereof.
>
> Exactly. And this is why Cogent's statement to the public (and their
> customers) is an outright lie. Level 3 isn't "denying Level 3's
> customers access to Cogent's customers and denying Cogent's customers
> access to Level 3 customers.". It's just that they deny Cogent
> settlement-free direct peering anymore. Cogent can get the L3 and L3
> customer routes elsewhere if they want. But Cogent doesn't. It's Cogents
> decision to break connectivity, not L3's.
>
> If I would be a Cogent customer, I would have a _very_ warm word with my
> sales rep why they are trying to bs me with those kind of statements and
> think that I actually am dumb enough to believe that.
>
>
> Regards,
> Daniel

Some would argue about Cogent being a tier 1 carrier. I honestly don't know 
anymore. All I do know, is that when I was still provisioning circuits 
within PSINet years ago, PSINet was on the verge of being a tier 1 as they 
had bilateral peering with the majority of the other tier 1 carriers at the 
time. Now, when Cogent took over the PSINet fiber backbone, I've no idea if 
they kept those peering points hot or not. If they did, then they should 
have plenty of pathing to L3 even with the direct peer being down. As you 
also said, I would think that if that traffic isn't getting through from 
Cogent's net to L3, there's an issue with Cogent's routing of that traffic 
unless L3 has placed a direct acl prohibiting any Cogent IP space from 
entering their network. That's a big if though simply because of the amount 
of traffic that will get just blown away by doing that.

--

Micheal Patterson
Senior Communications Systems Engineer
405-917-0600

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