Re: Level 3's side of the story

["Stephen J. Wilcox" <steve () telecomplete co uk>]

On Sat, 8 Oct 2005, Richard A Steenbergen wrote:

> the last two times Cogent was depeered, it responded by intentionally blocking
> connectivity to the network in question, despite the fact that both of those
> networks were Sprint customers and thus perfectly reachable under the Sprint
> transit Cogent gets from Verio. While no one has come forward to say if the
> Cogent/Verio agreement is structured for full transit or only Sprint/ATDN
> routes, Cogent has certainly set a precedent for intentionally disrupting
> connectivity in response to depeering, as a scare tactic to keep other
> networks from depeering them.

i dont see it like that.. and you reapply your view in your later email to me.

cogent and level3 were peers. level3 want to change that, the only solution 
level3 will consider is for cogent to purchase transit with another provider 
(sprint/verio) or pay them direct.


whether cogent's contract with verio could provide it transit to level3 for the 
same price is irrelevant. the fact is cogent currently does not use verio for 
this and they do not want to add a number of Gbps to their transit service

theres nothing special about level3 being tier-1 and cogent being tier-2 with 
verio transit. the status of these networks is not of issue, both sides have a 
right to decide whether to connect via settlement free peering or not. of course 
for level3 to transit to cogent would be inconceivable to them, but thats ego / 
economics / marketing, not a principle of networking

that either network could use transit to reach the other is an engineering 
point, that neither wants to pay to do so is a business point. and this is a 
business problem.

Steve