Cogent & HE

Thu Jun 9 22:21:33 UTC 2011

On Thu, Jun 09, 2011 at 12:55:44AM -0700, Owen DeLong wrote:
> 
> Respectfully, RAS, I disagree. I think there's a big difference 
> between being utterly unwilling to resolve the situation by peering 
> and merely refusing to purchase transit to a network that appears to 
> offer little or no value to the purchaser or their customers.

Owen, can you please name me one single instance in the history of the 
Internet where a peering dispute which lead to network partitioning did 
NOT involve one side saying "hey, we're willing to peer" and the other 
side saying "no thanks"? Being the one who wants to peer means 
absolutely NOTHING here, the real question is which side is causing the 
partitioning, and in this case the answer is very clearly HE.

HE wants to peer with Cogent, Cogent doesn't want to peer with HE, and 
thus you have an impass and there will be no peering. HE has no problem 
using transit to reach Cogent for IPv4 (I see HE reaching Cogent via 
1299/Telia, and Cogent reaching HE via 3549/Global Crossing, both very 
clearly HE transit providers and Cogent peers), but HE has chosen not to 
use transit for the IPv6 traffic. Quite simply, HE feels that they are 
entitled to peer with Cogent for the IPv6 traffic, and has deliberately 
chosen to create this partition to try and force the issue. These are 
*PRECISELY* the same motivations and actions as EVERY OTHER NETWORK who 
has ever created a network partition in pursuit of peering that the 
other party doesn't want to give them, period.

Again, this isn't necessarily a bad thing if HE thinks it can work to 
their long term advantage, but to try and claim that this is anything 
else is completely disingenuous. I understand that you have a PR 
position to take, and you may even have done a good job convincing the 
weak minded who don't understand how peering works that HE is the 
victim, but please don't try to feed a load of bullshit to the rest of 
us. :)

-- 
Richard A Steenbergen <ras at e-gerbil.net>       http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras
GPG Key ID: 0xF8B12CBC (7535 7F59 8204 ED1F CC1C 53AF 4C41 5ECA F8B1 2CBC)