Arbitrary de-peering

Mon Jul 28 15:24:54 UTC 2008

Le 08-07-28 à 17:12, nancyp at yorku.ca a écrit :

> ----Example: A York University professor was sitting at his desk at  
> work in
> March 2008 trying to reach an internet website located somewhere in  
> Europe.
> [...] York’s bandwidth supplier is Cogent which had severed a  
> peering relationship
> with a bandwidth provider in Europe called Telia [...] which was the  
> bandwidth
> network provider for the website that the Professor was trying to  
> reach. [...]
> Cogent did not proactively inform the University of the issue and  
> the loss of
> connectivity. Unreachability due to arbitrariness in network peering  
> is unacceptable.

There must be more to this story. If Cogent de-peered from Telia the  
traffic would
normally just have taken another path. Either there was a  
configuration error of some
sort or else some sort of proactive black-holing on one side or the  
other. As the
latter would be surprising and very heavy handed, I would tend to  
suspect the former.

Peering relationships are made and severed all the time with no  
particular ill-effects,
unless you can point to examples of outright malice (i.e. of the black- 
holing kind) I
don't think there is much basis for any public policy decisions in  
this example.

Unreachability due to configuation error is of course relatively  
common; perhaps I am
wrong, but I don't think the CRTC would really have much to say about  
that.

Cheers,
-w