Cogent/Level 3 depeering

Wed Oct 5 21:51:50 UTC 2005

On Wed, Oct 05, 2005 at 11:11:05PM +0200, Daniel Roesen wrote:
> 
> not wanting to buy more transit. Given that Cogent was not yet on the
> same "eye level" (no pun intended) with Level 3, I as a hypothetical
> Cogent customer would blame Cogent to not having made provisions for
> that case. Again, I said that from the perspective of a Cogent
> customer knowing "the hierarchy" out there.

I think the obvious answer from Cogent, though perhaps phrased a little 
bit nicer, is: for the price you pay for transit, sit down, shut up, 
and wait for us to resolve the issue in a way that lets us keep selling 
you cheap transit.

On Cogent's side is the fact that the vast majority (at least by traffic 
volume) of its customers understand that you don't get a free lunch in 
this world. You don't pay the price that Cogent charges for transit AND 
get your butt wiped during every little issue, there just isn't enough 
money to go around. The majority of Cogent customers are multihomed, and 
rely on Cogent as a "it works pretty well most of the time" solution. If a 
Cogent customer wants to continue paying the price that they do for 
transit, they will sit down and be quiet, let (3) customers (who are more 
high-dollar and high-touch almost across the board) do the complaining, 
and try to have the situation resolved in favor of (3) giving in so Cogent 
can continue to dump bits to them for cheap.

The confusion comes when folks expect to have their cake and eat it too. 
You don't pay Cogent enough money for them to buy transit to L3 when L3 
wants to depeer them. That is why smart people who use Cogent multihome. 
Anyone who doesn't understand this is not understanding the simple 
economic realities of the product they are buying.

-- 
Richard A Steenbergen <ras at e-gerbil.net>       http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras
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