Cogent/Level 3 depeering

Thu Oct 6 17:42:14 UTC 2005

On Thu, Oct 06, 2005 at 01:33:38PM +0200, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
> 
> It's more likely someone skimps on connections they pay per meg for than 
> peering links, therefore it's in my expereience more likely to be 
> uncongested on peering links than transit links.

Sometimes yes, sometimes. no. With a transit provider I can call a sales 
rep and have a new circuit installed in 30 days or I start getting SLA 
credits. If said provider is doing something wrong, I can vote with my 
wallet and take my business to someone else who will do better.

With a peer, even a friendly one, you are at the mercy of the cashflow, 
capacity, goodwill, and traffic engineering clue of another network that 
is essentially out of your control. Some folks are really good at peering, 
and some folks are really really bad at peering. Ask anyone who does 
enough peering and they will have a list of network about whom they will 
say "if we didn't send them X amount of traffic, we would shut their 
non-responsive prefix-leaking non-upgrading frequent-outage asses off in 
an instant". Just because a network is big and important doesn't mean that 
they are taking proper steps to manage the traffic and ensure reliable 
peering, or even that there is anyone manning the helm at all. And then 
there is AT&T... But that is an issue for another day. :)

In my experience, since there is "no revenue" associated with the peering 
port on the other side, even very big networks who depend on reliable 
peering for their business manage to sit on necessary upgrades to peers 
for months or even years longer than they would if it was a customer port.

-- 
Richard A Steenbergen <ras at e-gerbil.net>       http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras
GPG Key ID: 0xF8B12CBC (7535 7F59 8204 ED1F CC1C 53AF 4C41 5ECA F8B1 2CBC)