Re: Cogent/Level 3 depeering

[Jeff Shultz <jeffshultz () wvi com>]

John Payne wrote:

> If nobody filtered BGP at all (in or out), you would have the state you 
> are expecting.  However, you would have both a capacity problem, and an 
> economic failure, as you may well end up with cogent trying to send all 
> (much) of it's level3 destined traffic through a customer's connection 
> with much smaller pipes... or overloading it's connectivity to one of 
> its other peers.  The economic failure comes because now you're 
> expecting a third party to transit packets between cogent and level3 
> without being paid for it (and some of those connections are metered).

Okay. I always figured that the difference between peering and transit 
was that you paid for one and not the other. I had no idea that when you 
bought transit from someone, you weren't automatically buying transit to 
_all_ of that providers other connections.

Interesting. Balkanization of the Internet anyone? As one other 
commenter hinted at, it does sound like a recipe for encouraging 
multi-homing, even at the lowest levels. How many ASN's can the system 
handle currently?

--
Jeff Shultz