Sprint v. Cogent, some clarity & facts

Mon Nov 3 09:26:59 UTC 2008

* Patrick W. Gilmore:

> 1. Neither Sprint nor Cogent have transit
> Both Sprint & Cogent are transit-free networks.  (Notice how I
> carefully avoided saying "tier one"?)  Whether one or both _should_
> have transit is not a fact, and therefore outside the scope of this e- 
> mail, but that neither have transit today is a fact.  (And please
> don't tell me how Network X has 100 Mbps of transit in Sri Lanka
> because they are too lazy to lease undersea cable.  If you don't
> understand what I am saying here, stop reading now.)
>
> 2. The Internet cannot "route around" de-peering
> I know everyone believes "the Internet routes around failures".  While
> occasionally true, it does not hold in this case.  To "route around"
> the "failure" would require transit.  See item #1.

Out of curiosity, what would happen if one of the parties got transit
from a business POV?  Not just in this particular case, but in
general.

Doesn't this work because they are so large that any such arrangement
would immediately threaten traffic ratios at the (transit-free)
transit provider?

> 3. Standard transit contracts do not guarantee full connectivity

If this were true, why would end users (or, more generally, not
significantly multi-homed networks) buy transit from such networks?