Level 3 and Cogent Reach Agreement on Peering

Armour Hotdog writes "Level3 and Cogent have announced an agreement on a modified peering contract that provides for settlement-free peering subject to certain unspecified conditions. This is a welcome announcement considering the disruption caused earlier when Level3 depeered Cogent. After that earlier dispute, Level3 temporarily restored peering, but announced that they would once again depeer Cogent on November 9th, unless the parties could come to an agreement."

How was this allowed to happen?

I think the "depeering" probably shouldn't have happened, and should not have affected people that weren't involved in the dispute, i.e. the rest of us. Had this happened with any other utility, there would be investigations.

Internet Latency

Good! Everytime they do this, businesses are affected, on the backend if nothing else. It screws up B2B and EDI xactions like mad. If companies can prove that it affected their bottom line, what recourse do they have???

Re:Internet Latency

Not only are businesses affected, but educational institutions are as well. At my workplace, we conduct many internet-based courses that completely *halted* when Level3 depeered Cogent. The professors of those courses had to quickly make major changes to their deadlines and course structure, to work around the outtage. That is the first time such actions have ever had to be taken here (including changes made due to hurricanes).

Free market solution regulation

After hearing hundreds of posts clamoring for government regulation (ie, slow to respond expensive monopoly), the best solution came quickly.

Why did this agreement happen? It happened because the market required it. Customers were unhappy, producers lost money, no one profited on either side.

If we pushed for regulation, how many years and billions of dollars would replace what two corporations did in a week or two on the demands of their customers?

Re:Free market solution regulation

When was the last time you remember that Sprint customers were cut off from being able to call MCI subscribers?

I don't want massive regulation, but something simple to prevent deliberate cut-offs would be nice, and it appears that the free market didn't solve that problem.

Re:Free market solution regulation

I use neither Level3 nor Cogent. I use an ISP with a multitude of backbone connections. That's provided by competition which isn't hampered by expensive regulation or licensing.

As for Sprint and MCI, I've had 5 occasions where my LD provider lost connect

Re:Free market solution regulation

Disclaimer: I'm not a "freemarketsrulefreemarketsrulefreemarketsrule" neocon freak, and I'm not defending the GPs argument *at all*.

But your analogy sucks because the size comparisons are wrong. If L(3) == Sprint, Cogent == MacleodUSA, not Cogent == MCI.

Re:Free market solution regulation

The best solution to this problem isn't regulation, it's the replacement of DNS with something non-centralized.

Care to explain what DNS has to do with a layer 3 peering arrangement?

Oh...that's right...nothing at all.

Re:Free market solution regulation

How does decentralized DNS help with backbone depeering?

Re:Free market solution regulation

DNS and routing really have very little to do with each other.

Most websites of any size whatsoever not only have multiple IP addresses assigned to the site (DNS), but also multiple links to the internet across carriers (routing). A problem in either area

consider an aphorism

Give a man a fish, he eats for a day. Teach him to fish and he eats for the rest of his life.

If a government agency just enforced some prior restraint on the companies, what have they learned? Not to do what they did. What have they learned by being forced to solve their problem themselves? Not to do what they did, and also how to successfully negotiate with each other when things go awry, what the market really wants from each firm, how to rapidly re-evaluate corporate strategy in the face of adverse external events -- in short, how to be more "grown-up" in managing their own affairs.

Stronger ties, but still breakable

In the new agreement, there are clauses that state that Level3 can again try to charge Cogent if their traffic amount is grossly over that of Level3's. So, while this is definitely an improvement, it doesn't rid all potential future problems.

If anything, this definitely hammers home the idea of multihoming...

"Pay up or we disrupt your business..."

Is it just me, or does Level 3's ultimatum sound alot like an old fashioned protection racket? How is this any different from the Don sending someone to smash up someone's shop after the owner misses a payment?

Is there any way to get law enforcement involved? What about a class action lawsuit?

Needs to be regulated

Tier 1 peering needs to be regulated in certain situations. The Cogent and Level 3 "who has the bigger dick" contest has caused isolated pockets where full routes/reachability to certain parts of the Internet wasn't available for some Cogent and L3 downstr

Re:Needs to be regulated

Tier 1 peering needs to be regulated in certain situations.

I'm for some regulation of the Internet, but not here. These guys went back to the table because they each had guns to their heads; their customers (on both sides) didn't really care whose fault it was and would've started leaving.

Calling for regulation would likely lead to California energy crisis-type situations: PG&E and Con Ed were both required to retail (at a fixed price) stuff they had to buy wholesale (on the open market) and when the wholesale price went above retail, bankruptcy. (Don't get into market manipulation, that's a peripheral issue). The Internet has been remarkably successful precisely because any yahoo with a router and a cable crimper could build out more of it, without a license, approvals or anything else.

Re:Needs to be regulated

You're missing the point. Cogent isn't a Tier 1 ISP. They're close, but not quite. To be a Tier 1, that means you don't pay for peering -- period. Cogent does.

This was a fairly straightforward business problem. Settlement-free peering only occurs when its in the best interests of both parties to do so. There are massive costs still incurred on each end, but they simply don't exchange money. The traffic in both directions is equal enough that neither side is incurring a loss. L3 determined that they were, and announced to Cogent that their settlement-free peering agreement was going to end.

Rather than doing what they should have done, and either ponied up the cash to L3, or reached a transit agreement with another ISP (say, a tier 2) to receive L3's prefixes and get its own prefixes onto L3's network, Cogent allowed the depeering to occur and used the resulting disruption to the Internet to their own advantage by calling L3 out.

They, in effect, allowed a major outage to occur in order to avoid paying for transit to L3. L3 gave them something like 90 days notice, plenty of time for Cogent to develop a contingency plan.

Yet, they didn't. Thier customers immediately became unreachable from L3's network, and their customers were unable to reach L3. They allowed this situation to continue, leveraging it for a public relations backlash against L3, and attempted to lure L3 customers to Cogent.

I'll be the first to admit my understanding of the issue is not 100% -- so if I'm missing a critical point, please let me know. But, from my understanding, let me be the first to say this is not a major problem with the Internet, nor is it something that regulation would do anything to fix. This is a bullshit back-room business decision by an ISP trying to save a buck and make a name for itself.

Cogent isn't without fault here

Are they going to learn their lesson and strike peering agreements with more tier ones then just Level 3?

Re:Cogent isn't without fault here

(with-cluehammer "You don't get it. Tier 1s have lots of peering agreements. A peering agreement with someone else DOESN'T entitle you to use their network to get to a third -- that would be transit. Basically, these guys said they wouldn't exchange traffic directly for free, and they wouldn't pay some other provider to act as a go-between, which, if you understand how these things work (reputation, game theory and all that) is perfectly logical.")

Re:Cogent isn't without fault here

Nope. Routing over one network to get to another is called *transit*. Cogent refused to pay for transit to get to L3. So they still had plenty of peering arangements with other networks, but none of those peering arangements allowed Cogent to reach L3. (And the same could be said in reverse.)

The interesting bit

Oct. 7: We determined that the agreement that we had with Cogent was not equitable to Level 3. [...] Cogent was sending far more traffic to the Level 3 network than Level 3 was sending to Cogent's network.

Oct. 28: The modified peering arrangement allows for the continued exchange of traffic between the two companies' networks, and includes commitments from each party with respect to the characteristics and volume of traffic to be exchanged. Under the terms of the agreement, the companies have agreed to the settlement-free [i.e. no-charge -- ed.] exchange of traffic subject to specific payments if certain obligations are not met.

So what happened? It's unlikely Cogent could say "Oh yeah, we'll get 50% more retail customers so as to send traffic your way." Level 3's customers squawked and Cogent insisted they wouldn't pay? (That's Internet Mutually Assured Destruction)

Re:The interesting bit

the exact details of what was agreed to will probablly never be public

one possible condition could be moving some of the peering to other locations so level3 has to do less work and cognet has to do more to get the traffic between the desired endpoints. I

How does the phone company handle this?

I assume that the phone companies and mobile companies have similar (though not identical) issues to this. Aren't they mandated to provide access to their networks to other providers (e.g., Vonage)? What restrictions/costs are typically involved?

STOP THE CLUELESSNES!

Dudes, there's a lot of cluelessness here, about tarpitting, routing around failure, next best route etcetera.

Being a tier 1 means, essentially, HAVING NO DEFAULT ROUTES. You make deals with all the other tier 1 providers for direct connections at various places around the country and, if you can't colocate with a particular tier 1 in a particular geographic location, you pay another provider for transit from you to that tier 1. Being at the top of the pyramid, there's no default route you can hand packets off to when one of your connections fails - because that would mean somebody else was providing you with a free lunch.

Of course, these guys are constantly squabbling ("we're bigger than you, so you should be paying us for the privilege") but, since disconnecting affects both peers' customers, it's really cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Re:Hah

Oops - I guess I could have phrased that a little more clearly. The November 9th ultimatum came when Level 3 originally restored peering back on 10/07. Today's agreement supercedes that, so the danger of another depeering (between these two ISPs) has pas

Re:Leve3 and us. Also why did it break stuff?

The core of the Internet is not run like you think it would be. While BGP is dynamic, when and where various prefixes (network address blocks) are advertised is tightly controlled.

When you peer with an ISP, that means you only exchange their prefixes for