Cogent/Level 3 depeering

Wed Oct 5 21:12:01 UTC 2005

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jeff Shultz" <jeffshultz at wvi.com>
To: "Simon Lockhart" <simon at slimey.org>
Cc: "NANOG list" <nanog at nanog.org>
Sent: Wednesday, October 05, 2005 2:35 PM
Subject: Re: Cogent/Level 3 depeering

>
> Simon Lockhart wrote:
>
>> Yes, it could have - I'm led to believe that one of the parties does 
>> purchase
>> transit. However, moving all that traffic over transit rather than 
>> peering
>> would cost them a significant amount of money - and as they're running 
>> their
>> transit service at extremely low cost, they probably would find it hard 
>> to
>> fund the use of transit to reach the other party.
>>
>> Simon
>
> Okay, here is how I see this war... which seems to be the proper term for 
> it.
>
> 1. Level 3 is probably annoyed at Cogent for doing the extremely low cost 
> transit thing, thus putting price pressures on other providers - including 
> them. So they declared war.
>
> 2. Level 3's assault method is to drop peering with Cogent, in hopes this 
> will force Cogent to purchase transit to them in some fashion (does Level 
> 3 have an inflated idea of their own worth?), also forcing them to raise 
> prices and hopefully (for Level 3) returning some stability to the market.
>
> 3. Cogent's counter-attack is to instead offer free transit to all single 
> homed Level 3 customers instead, effectively stealing them (and their 
> revenue) from Level 3... and lowering the value of Level 3 service some 
> amount as well.
>
> 4. Next move, if they choose to make one, is Level 3's.
>
> Fun. I think I'll stay in the trenches.
>
> -- 
> Jeff Shultz
>

Could be that a bilateral peer contract isn't being fulfilled and L3 got 
tired of taking the full load of the traffic. PSInet killed the peer with 
C&W for that very reason, regardless of what was told to the general public 
about it years ago. C&W simply wouldn't provision their peering OC3 so 
PSINet killed theirs. Without know all sides of this one, and having access 
to the router configs at each side, no one will be able to really say who's 
breaking routing or who's got an active acl up and who doesn't. Traffic flow 
is apparently still broken otherwise, with these two peering as they do with 
over tier 1's, bgp should have settled the problem as intended. My guess is 
that either one or even both sides may still have active static routes in 
place breaking bgp routing.

--

Micheal Patterson
Senior Communications Systems Engineer
405-917-0600

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