Sprint v. Cogent, some clarity & facts

Tue Nov 4 02:04:26 UTC 2008

On Nov 3, 2008, at 8:16 PM, George William Herbert wrote:
> Patrick writes:
>> 3. Standard transit contracts do not guarantee full connectivity
>> If you are a Cogent customer, it is very unlikely your contract will
>> allow you SLA or other credits for not being able to reach Sprint
>> unless you negotiated something special.  I doubt Sprint's standard
>> contract is much different.  Transit contract SLAs end at AS
>> boundaries.  This is because Network A has no control over Network B
>> and therefore will not give credit if Network B fails.  Of course,  
>> you
>> can still sue, threaten to terminate, etc., but the letter of the
>> contract almost certainly says nothing about packets going beyond  
>> your
>> transit provider's ASN.
>
> I am not aware of any major content provider who still has
> any agreements in place that don't say anything about routing
> past the provider's network.

Content hosting != transit


> Some weren't paying any attention when they signed up initially
> and didn't get the specific provisions.  But once bitten by such,
> renewals Do Not Happen without additional clauses being inserted.
>
> I don't rule out there still being such agreements, but I think that
> anyone with a clue and enough traffic to think about multihoming
> has been exposed to this and should have insisted on some legal
> protection about best-effort to route to rest of world.  It never
> fails to impress me how many people have little clue, though...


"Never underestimate the power of human stupidity."

-- 
TTFN,
patrick