Which is now in Africa? I'm getting confused with the geography here. Must be the Cell tower near my house. Seriously, Didn't a town in California try to ban cellphones / Wifi a couple of years ago?

Having been in the business (Tier 1 and Tier2 ISP's, backbone routing ect...), About 8 or 9 years back, the "peer war" really took off. Who should be paying for what and the "I'm bigger than you, pay me" attitude. Several Tier 1, Tier 2 and about every Tier 3 wanted to start negotiations on basing economical (or practically next to nothing) peering based on capacity and quantity in the "lets all work together to balance traffic patterns out" based on that criteria. Problem was as a Tier 3 grew and more capacity and quantity were added they were working the way up the ladder. This never sat well with the Sprint, the newly formed Worldcom, ATT and several others basically because the smaller ISP's could undercut costs and as a responsible AS you really should have redundant backward links based on your daily traffic (trust me, there were some REAL humdingers out there). Anyway, the war of the network's still rages on between the smaller ISP's (presumably Cogent although the stat's really aren't showing that)and the larger one's(Sprint, IMO is not all that and a bag of chips.) I started in the business around 1994, and all this time we thought the companies would at least get together on certain things like peering with out all the fuss and at least come to terms with recieving and sending of traffic with out isolating some mom and pop organization which by some posts has happened. If Cogent has more traffic, then they should pay more in consideration. If they have less than Sprint can't hold them to already agreed on fee's. I would assume that if Cogent got behind than ANY check in the mail to Sprint would have avoided client interruptions and they could have sat down and worked something out. (I'm sure Sprint would have settled if Cogent had explained the situation) I would have to blame Cogent more than Sprint in this deal because the "resonsibility" factor to Cogent's clients. This is a war that will never be won, the losers will always be the small co-lo and ISP and home customers. .....and the convergence goes on....