Re: Cogent & HE

[Owen DeLong <owen () delong com>]

On Jun 8, 2011, at 1:05 PM, Richard A Steenbergen wrote:

> On Wed, Jun 08, 2011 at 07:48:42PM +0000, Brielle Bruns wrote:
> > Has been going on for a long while now.  HE even made a cake for 
> > Cogent (IIRC), to no avail.
> >
> > But, this is not surprising.  A lot of public/major peering issues 
> > with v4 over the past few years has been cogent vs. someone else.
>
> When two networks are not able to reach each other like this, it usually 
> requires the active willing participation of both parties to allow the 
> situation to continue. In this case, HE is doing *PRECISELY* the same 
> thing that Cogent is doing. They're refusing to purchase transit, and 
> making the decision to intentionally not carry a full table or have 
> global reachability, in the hopes that it will strengthen their 
> strategic position for peering in the long term (i.e. they both want to 
> be an "IPv6 Tier 1").
Not exactly.

We are perfectly willing to peer with Cogent. They are not only refusing
to purchase transit, they are refusing to peer. To me, that's a pretty big
difference.

To be an IPv6 TIer 1, one has to peer with other IPv6 Tier 1s. HE has
aggressively tried to improve the situation through promiscuous peering
in every way possible. If you are interested in peering with HE and
you have a presence at any of the exchange points we are at, send
an email to peering at HE.NET and we will peer.

I'd say that's pretty different from what Cogent is doing.

> I'm not making a judgement call about the rightness or wrongness of the 
> strategy (and after all, it clearly hasn't been THAT big of an issue 
> considering that it has been this way for MANY months), but to attempt 
> to "blame" one party for this issue is the height of absurdity. PR 
> stunts and cake baking not withstanding, they're both equally complicit.

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