Arbitrary de-peering

Mon Jul 28 15:31:33 UTC 2008

http://www.renesys.com/blog/2008/03/you_cant_get_there_from_here_1.shtml

http://www.renesys.com/blog/2008/03/he_said_she_said_cogent_vs_tel.shtml

http://www.renesys.com/blog/2008/03/telia_and_cogent_kiss_and_make_1.shtml

On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 11:24 AM, William Waites <ww at styx.org> wrote:

> 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
>