Level 3's side of the story

Sat Oct 8 11:54:52 UTC 2005

DISCLAIMER:  From one of the clueless

During this entire debaucle, I never saw any mention of:

1)  Cogent sending "transit" traffic to Level3, which leads me to believe 
that all the traffic from Cogent through the peering points was actually 
*destined* for Level3 customers.   Does the routing support this idea?  Is 
it safe to assume the opposite, also... that only traffic destined for 
Cogent customers came through the Level3 peering points?  And that Level3 
had one and only one path to Cogent (no one else providing transit for them 
to Cogent AS'es?)

2)  Level3 making any contingency for their own customers to reach Cogent 
networks (any announcements to their own customers)

3)  Possible traffic issues.  Was Cogent guilty of not transporting the 
Level3-bound packets within the Cogent network to the closest point-of-entry 
peer to the host in the Level3 network, therefore "costing" Level3 transit 
of their own packets?  In other words is it also a traffic engineering 
issue?

Are some of the business issues solvable by proper engineering and filtering 
(or statistics-jockeying)?

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jon Lewis" <jlewis at lewis.org>
To: <nanog at merit.edu>
Sent: Friday, October 07, 2005 9:45 PM
Subject: RE: Level 3's side of the story

>
> On Fri, 7 Oct 2005, David Hubbard wrote:
>
>>> I don't remember seeing this public notice from Level(3) posted....
>>> Wouldn't that be "without notice from Level(3)"?
>>
>> They notified Cogent, not the public.  Cogent chose to
>
> I think it's also interesting, that AFAIK, Level3 didn't give their own 
> customers any advance notice.  We're a customer.  I saw nothing about this 
> until it hit nanog.  We're multi homed, so the impact on us was unnoticed.
>
> Suppose you're a single homed L3 or Cogent customer doing regular business 
> with a single homed Cogent or L3 customer.  If your provider gave you 
> several weeks notice, and if you realized the coming problem, you might 
> take some steps to work around the issue, depending on how important your 
> internet communications are.  Do the typical peering NDAs forbid giving 
> customers this sort of notice?  Is it better to surprise them with a 
> multi-day outage and then give them 30 days notice that it's going to 
> happen again??
>
>>> Splendid, that gives the world sufficient time to accept
>>> Cogent's offer of 1 year free service.
>>
>> This is not the first time Cogent has used their customers
>> as pawns in peering disputes, I don't know if I'd jump on
>> the bandwagon so quickly (spoken as a customer of both
>> companies).
>
> If you're multihomed and using Cogent as a cheap bandwidth whore, does it 
> matter if their cheap bandwidth gives you 155k routes instead of 168k 
> routes?  After all, if its cheap and off-loads enough traffic from your 
> more expensive 168k route circuits, isn't it doing what you bought it for?
>
> Also, is 30 days really enough time for anyone to get a free connection to 
> Cogent?  I mean if you're in a building they're already in, and its just a 
> cross connect, sure that can be done quickly...but at least around here, 
> getting any sort of high bandwidth circuit (>T1) can take months.  IIRC, 
> the UNE DS3 connecting our office to the rest of our network was several 
> months late.
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
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