Cogent/Level 3 depeering

Fri Oct 7 14:54:51 UTC 2005

In a message written on Fri, Oct 07, 2005 at 10:40:50AM -0400, Lamar Owen wrote:
> Yes, you would be correct.  Which offers an interesting thought: why would
> it be important for you then but not now?  If the issue impacts your
> customers, then why not spend the 3 minutes reconfiguring your router(s)?
> (obviously, if it doesn't impact your customers, then ignore that).

I venture any other ISP of importance either has direct connectivity
to Cogent and Level 3, and/or buys transit from someone who does.
All but the smallest most trivial ISP's are multi-homed.  Those
that are have seen no result from this, by and large.  I can all
my customers can get to both.

> In other words, this problem is a problem simply because people can't be
> bothered to fix the problem because it's just a customer service issue,
> and not 'helping out fellow backbone providers?'  Shades of the old
> backbone cabal here.  (yes, a healthy dose of cynicism there)

No, it doesn't affect anyone else's customers.  Period.  "Fixing
it" in this case would be offering Charity to Level 3 and Cogent,
and offering your competitors Charity, particularly for their own
mistake is not high on most business plans.

There's a very large difference between offering charity to a
competitor, and keeping the industry going in the face of disaster.
To suggest the two are related at all is just absurd.  If someone
wants to cut their network off from someone else for a business
reason they will be able to do that whatever the design of the
network may be.  Level 3 and Cogent are both actively causing this
outage.  It's not some grand design failure.

-- 
       Leo Bicknell - bicknell at ufp.org - CCIE 3440
        PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
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