nanog mailing list archives

Re: net neutrality peering dispute between CenturyTel/Qwest and Cogent in Dallas


From: jim deleskie <deleskie () gmail com>
Date: Sat, 15 Aug 2015 14:32:38 -0300

In my 20+ yrs now of playing this game, "everyone" has had a turn thinking
their content/eyeballs are special and should get free "peering".

On Sat, Aug 15, 2015 at 1:59 PM, Mike Hammett <nanog () ics-il net> wrote:

Arrogance is the only reason I can think of why the incumbents think that
way. I'd be surprised if any competitive providers (regardless of their
market dominance) would expect free peering.




-----
Mike Hammett
Intelligent Computing Solutions
http://www.ics-il.com



Midwest Internet Exchange
http://www.midwest-ix.com


----- Original Message -----

From: "Owen DeLong" <owen () delong com>
To: "Matthew Huff" <mhuff () ox com>
Cc: nanog () nanog org
Sent: Saturday, August 15, 2015 11:44:57 AM
Subject: Re: net neutrality peering dispute between CenturyTel/Qwest and
Cogent in Dallas

This issue isn’t limited to Cogent.

There is this bizarre belief by the larger eyeball networks (and CC, VZ,
and TW are the worst offenders, pretty much in that order) that they are
entitled to be paid by both the content provider _AND_ the eyeball user for
carrying bits between the two.

In a healthy market, the eyeball providers would face competition and the
content providers would simply ignore these demands and the eyeballs would
buy from other eyeball providers.

Unfortunately, especially in the US, we don’t have a healthy market. In
the best of circumstances, we have oligopolies and in the worst places, we
have effective (or even actual) monopolies.

For example, in the area where I live, the claim you will hear is that
there is competition. With my usage patterns, that’s a choice between
Comcast (up to 30/7 $100/mo), AT&T DSL (1.5M/384k $40/mo+) and wireless (Up
to 30/15 $500+/month).

I’m not in some rural backwater or even some second-tier metro. I’m within
10 miles of the former MAE West and also within 10 miles of Equinix SV1 (11
Great Oaks). There’s major fiber bundles within 2 miles of my house. I’m
near US101 and Capitol Expressway in San Jose.

The reason that things are this way, IMHO, is because we have allowed
“facilities based carriers” to leverage the monopoly on physical
infrastructure into a monopoly for services over that infrastructure.

The most viable solution, IMHO, is to require a separation between
physical infrastructure providers and those that provide services over that
infrastructure. Breaking the tight coupling between the two and requiring
physical infrastructure providers to lease facilities to operators on an
equal footing for all operators will reduce the barriers to competition in
the operator space. It will also make limited competition in the facilities
space possible, though unlikely.

This model exists to some extent in a few areas that have municipal
residential fiber services, and in most of those localities, it is working
well.

That’s one of the reasons that the incumbent facilities based carriers
have lobbied so hard to get laws in states where a city has done this that
prevent other cities from following suit.

Fortunately, one of the big gains in recent FCC rulings is that these laws
are likely to be rendered null and void.

Unfortunately, there is so much vested interest in the status quo that
achieving this sort of separation is unlikely without a really strong grass
roots movement. Sadly, the average sound-bite oriented citizen doesn’t know
(or want to learn) enough to facilitate such a grass-roots movement, so if
we want to build such a future, we have a long slog of public education and
recruitment ahead of us.

In the mean time, we’ll get to continue to watch companies like CC, VZ, TW
screw over their customers and the content providers their customers want
to reach for the sake of extorting extra money from both sides of the
transaction.

Owen

On Aug 15, 2015, at 06:40 , Matthew Huff <mhuff () ox com> wrote:

It's only partially about net neutrality. Cogent provides cheap
bandwidth for content providers, and sends a lot of traffic to eyeball
networks. In the past, peering partners expected symmetrical load sharing.
Cogent feels that eyeball networks should be happy to carry their traffic
since the customers want their services, the eyeball networks want Cogent
to pay them extra. When there is congestion, neither side wants to upgrade
their peeing until this is resolved, so they haven't. This has been going
on for at least 5 years, and happens all over the cogent peering map.

Depending on what protocol you are using, it can be an issue or not. Our
end users on eyeball networks had difficulty maintaining VPN connections.
We had to drop our Cogent upstream and work with our remaining upstream
provides to traffic engineer around Cogent. YMMV.



----
Matthew Huff | 1 Manhattanville Rd
Director of Operations | Purchase, NY 10577
OTA Management LLC | Phone: 914-460-4039
aim: matthewbhuff | Fax: 914-694-5669

-----Original Message-----
From: NANOG [mailto:nanog-bounces () nanog org] On Behalf Of Jordan
Hamilton
Sent: Friday, August 14, 2015 5:31 PM
To: nanog () nanog org
Subject: net neutrality peering dispute between CenturyTel/Qwest and
Cogent in Dallas

I have several customers that are having packet loss issues, the packet
loss appears to be associated with a Cogent router interface of
38.104.86.222. My upstream provider is telling me that the packet loss is
being caused by a net neutrality peering dispute between CenturyTel/Quest
and Cogent in Dallas. I did some quick googling to see if I could come up
with any articles or something like that I could provide to my customers
and did not see anything. Anyone know any details?

Thanks

Jordan Hamilton
Senior Telecommunications Engineer

Empire District Electric Co.
720 Schifferdecker
PO Box 127
Joplin, MO 64802

Ph: 417-625-4223
Cell: 417-388-3351


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