Internet Partitioning - Cogent vs Level 3?

slashmicah asks: "Internet partitioning and Tier 1 ISPs are something most people don't know much about (myself included). Today, however, some Slashdot readers might have run into some issues involving these two topics. Cogent Communications and Level 3, both Tier 1 ISPs, are apparently having some 'undisclosed' disagreements, causing an Internet partition by turning-off or deactivating their peering point. Cogent Co. has released a statement explaining their side of the problem, however they have no mention of when the problem will be fixed, or when they will sort it out. This partitioning is a problem because any [single-homed] computers that are connected through Cogent Co, can not connect to [single-homed] computers connected through Level 3. Having spent all day sorting out this problem, I ask Slashdot: Isn't there a better way that the issue of peering can be handled/regulated? If not, does the future hold a scenario in which the Internet is split into several separate networks, only to be connected at the whims of large corporations?"

Interesting scenario, though most likely untrue.

[versiondub]

While it is always fun to entertain such doomsday scenarios in ones' mind, I don't think that anything like this is possible. Current demands of most large corporations (Microsoft, Apple, any number of others) along with the internet-using public are for a universally-connected internet. Any company that simply creates its own network is going to face a huge revenue loss.

Really easy solution all net-ops already know

[ProfaneBaby]

Don't expect to peer with people bigger than you for free forever.

"A true peer relationship is based on the supposition that either party
can terminate the interconnection relationship and that the other party
does not consider such an action a competitively hostile act. If one
party has a high reliance on the interconnection arrangement and the
other does not, then the most stable business outcome is that this
reliance is expressed in terms of a service contract with the other
party, and a provider/client relationship is established"

Level3 is threatened by Cogent's bandwidth pricing model, and is using it's weight to threaten that model, forcing Cogent to buy transit if it wants to reach its network. THat's how things work: you can't get free bandwidth from everyone, you're going to have to be willing to step up and pay for your link.

Re:Interesting scenario, though most likely untrue

[ewe2]

It's possibly on a par with the scenario of countries cutting others off their internet connections. Not that it can't be done, but the repercussions are akin to MAD. Although these days with the effective merger of state and corporate interests anything can happen...

Re:PITA but move along

[branto]

Miscellaneous people calling up to bitch about not being able to reach Network B from Network A isn't going to accomplish a thing. This is a business decision made by Level3, and they are fully within their rights to do so. Any customers that are feeling the burn of this are in that position because they are not multi-homed. Maybe this "incident" will wake them up to that shortsightedness, maybe it won't... If you are building a network out there, make sure you use 2 Carriers that are either big enough to warrant that this type of peer posturing doesn't happen, or, you buy service from a carrier who buys transit from one of them.

Re:OK, WTF time here

[gellenburg]

Okay, first off if your physician is using any IP-based service and ISN'T using a dedicated connection then no one's to blame except the fucktard who set it up in the first place.

If you keep the following in mind, you will be a much happier person:

(a) The Internet is not guaranteed to be secure.
(b) The Internet is not guaranteed to be reliable.

Anyone making claims to the contrary is a charlatan.

Re:OK, WTF time here

[Anonymous Coward]

If my doctor is consulting with a cardiac specialist over using VoIP (V being either voice or video) concerning an acute health problem then I have a much larger problem with outages.

You must be new to the internet, so let me explain something: If you think your life depends on the internet, you do not deserve to live.

Seriously. People lose water, electricity, cable TV, etc, all the time. They don't all suddenly die. What exactly do you propose the government does when the internet goes down? Send in FEMA?

As a rule...

[jafiwam]

I have been kicking around the fringes of the high-speed data stuff for a number of years, and there's one true lesson to be learned;

Telcos suck.

ALL of them do in their own special way.

Re:Reminds me of...

[ADRA]

We have one large regional telco that interconnects most cities in our area and they don't pay for their peering. There's also city carrier that supplys end-point access to many city businesses. This city carrier has peer access to many different regional networks but they pay for their agreements. The small guy's peers just don't have enough financial interest in the link to give it away for free.

A data carrier makes their money off the small guys that want to plug into the heavily funded infrastructure that the big guys have spent much time building up. If you have two equally sized carriers with equal data being sent/received to the other network, it makes perfect sense to peer them. Since they both have to bridge the gap to one another's network somehow, its cheaper to go directly to one another.

Now, lets say the data flow rate isn't symetric. TinyISP and UberISP. TinyISP uses 100Mb/s on UberISP's network, but UberISP only uses 1.2Mb/s on Tiny's network. UberISP wouldn't feel inclined to allow a peering agreement since most of the financial benefit is happening by TinyISP.

Now with all that said, your argument is only partially correct. Yes, "The internet will see that as damage and route around it" can happen, but it isn't the magical sugar plum fairy granting magical bandwidth to route this traffic. Its Cogent footing the bill to L3 or some other peer in order to get to their intended recipients. Thats if L3 hasn't blocked the Cogent Netblocks as well. In which case, Cogent would be forced to have a peer Source-NAT their traffic if they wanted to reach L3 resources. Thankfully, To my knowledge this crazy scenerio has never occured.

Re:OK, WTF time here

[rkuris]

Yes they are! They can instantly become single-peered. The whole point of being multi-peered means you have multiple connectivity. One goes down, temporarily, and the others stay up. At this point, this looks like more than just a temporary outage.

Re:Interesting scenario, though most likely untrue

[EndlessNameless]

Translation: Cogent will let any Level 3 customer who is cut off use their service for one year at no charge.

This will eliminate any internet performance anomalies for those customers so that they are not affected in a bad way by this issue. It's also a good PR move that might let them grab a few Level 3 customers who are impressed by the goodwill gesture.

This is bad. Very bad.

[hernick]

I have reviewed all information available at this time, including discussion threads on many sites more specialised than Slashdot. This is bad. Very bad. Right now, there are millions of Internet users with partial connectivity.

But the action of Level3 is not merely an inconvenience to end users; it is hurting a great many small businesses, badly. There are thousands of small businesses that depend on single-homed Internet connectivity and that cannot afford dual-homing. There are dozens of low-cost datacenters that provide single-homed bandwith to tens of thousands of servers.

As we speak, the livelyhoods of thousands of entrepreneurs are being threatened. Many people depend on being able to offer internet services to any peer on the net. But today, Level3 has changed the rules of the game, and have split the Internet into two somewhat isolated internets.

This is happening on a very large scale. Sure, most of the affected people and businesses are going to get through it just fine. But given the sheer scale of the Internet, a small percentage of those depending on full connectivity will not escape this ordeal unscathed.

You can be sure that a few small businesses will close because of this, the reputations of a few persons will be damaged, and there will be a few bankruptcies - all because of Level3's evil actions. You won't hear about it in the media - nobody cares about such small-scale damage. But the damage is already done, and it is getting worse with every passing hour.

I urge you to join me in a five-minute hate against Level3 and all that their evil discriminative ways stand for. While Cogent is widely recognized for its shitty cut-rate network, they are the good guys here. In the past few years, Cogent has been a major driving force for lowering bandwith costs. Level3 is fighting back, and they long for the days where they charged 5000$/mbps. I say: down with Level3 !

Re:Reminds me of...

[schickb]

Actually it appears that L3 has done more than just drop direct peering with Cogent. L3 seems to be filtering all traffic sourced from Cogent controlled IP blocks. So unless Cognet sets up a NAT arrangement with other peers, there is no way around this problem. L3 is actively blocking Cogent traffic.

If your company or ISP uses only Cogent for bandwidth, it is currently impossible to reach L3 only connected services. I believe L3 to Cogent is being blocked as well.

Re:Interesting scenario, though most likely untrue

[Anonymous Coward]

The internet is made up by many layers of ISPs. Individual users connect to a user-level ISP, which must then connect to other ISPs to gain access to the rest of the net. The biggest ISPs tend to trade bandwidth between themselves without any payments in terms of money, while they charge lesser ISPs to connect to their networks.

In this case I think it's a fair guess that Level 3, which used to let Cogent connect for free, has decided that they are enough smaller (Cogent is about half Level3's size, controlling a 'mere' 23+ million IPs), that they ought to be paying to use their network. Cogent probably refused to pay, at which point Level3 cut them off as a negotiating tactic.

Now people on ISPs who connect to the rest of the internet through cogent, and only cogent, can't connect to anything that connects to the net through Level3 and only Level3.

Any reputable ISP ought to connect to many others, not just a single large provider, and thus see at worst a noticeable slowdown in some sites due to this depeering. But there are always some people who go the cheap and easy way, set themselves up with a single point of failure, and get bit in the ass by events like this.

Re:OK, WTF time here

[EtherMonkey]

Okay, first off if your physician is using any IP-based service and ISN'T using a dedicated connection then no one's to blame except the fucktard who set it up in the first place.

1. Set down coffee cup;
2. Open front door;
3. Take deep breath;
4. Introduce yourself to reality.

Physicians are subject to the greater economic pressures than any other small business. Insurance companies, government regulations, litigation risks, patient scheduling, qualified and reliable staffing, emergency on-call, and obligitory hospital fundraising contributions. Given a choice between an $1,800/month point-to-point circuit PLUS provider termination and service fees, or a $59/month xDSL for probably 4x the bandwidth, which do you think most will use? If in doubt, give your physician a call and report back.

Re:As a rule...

[Vegeta99]

So what's worse? the Ma Bell behemoth that pretty much invented half of last century and wired the whole damn nation, or millions of little guys, getting into arguments about who can talk to who on the world's largest public-but-not-really network?

Re:OK, WTF time here

[GoldTeamRules]

Neither was phone or power or water until the government regulated these as public utilities by recognizing that the guarantee of these services serves a greater good.

Similar regulation of the internet will follow that will bring internet access to similar levels of guaranteed service that other utilities offer. It is only a matter of time.

More Regulation != Solution

[dada21]

I can't believe I'm hearing a call for more regulation, even U.N. control. The lack of rational thought and disregard of unintended consequences amazes me.

The Internet has flourished without much control, run by Both large and small businesses for one reason: profit. Information is free yet its distribution is profitable.

If we give government control (taxation, censorship and worse(, we'll see less freedom.

Why did this jinx happen? Because the top tier providers aren't making a profit. But their calls for support go unheard, so they found a way to make it news.

When businesses that rely on the infrastructure paid for by private industries, they have high expectations. But they're not paying for that infrastructure!

Trust me, no one wants to bifurcate the Internet. Its a ploy to show a problem that needs to be solved. You will Never see it done for control, censorship or monopoly powers. You'll only see it when consumers don't pay for what they use. See California's old electric company that was forced to sell energy at a loss. They went bankrupt.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Not to put too fine a point on it

[drsmithy]

If not, does the future hold a scenario in which the Internet is split into several separate networks, only to be connected at the whims of large corporations?

But that's exactly what the Internet is (well, sometime's they're connected at the whim of educational institutions, but the whole point of the internet is that it's a network of networks).

Re:Consider switching to someone less petulant

[urlgrey]

A big block of IP addresses does not a major ISP make.

Perhaps not on its surface, though this really has nothing to do with blocks reserved per se--especially for other uses like HAM readio. It's about IP block size and what's being done with the IP block.

In this case Cogent has:

1) the entire /8 for its use as an ISP and a common carrier--to say nothing of:
2) THEIR OWN FIBER [cogentco.com] under the ocean
3) one of only 13 ROOT DNS servers globally (C.ROOT-SERVERS.NET is in Cogent's 192.33.4.0/24 IP space)

as Cogent does, you're surely, surely not a small ISP!

The point is: as most of us are non-multi-homed end users of ISPs--even major ones like Cogent--we're now all subject to the whims of *other* ISPs as to whether or not we can see customers who aren't even hosted by them?!?! Grrrr.

For instance: right now no one on Comcast, Road Runner, or Verizon can see our sites or those of our customers. How does L3 get off doing that?

Re:This is bad. Very bad.

[code_monkey_cg]

There are thousands of small businesses that depend on single-homed Internet connectivity and that cannot afford dual-homing.

On the contrary, the point I got from this is that maybe small businesses can't afford not to purchase dual-homed service. Its all a risk assessment thing - how much is this actually costing the small business? How likely is it to happen in the future? Is it worth dual-homing to avoid this if it does?

Re:This is bad. Very bad.

[Anonymous Coward]

because they want Level3 to blink first, its a contest of wills, Cogent fancies itself a Tier 1 provider (ignore all the marketing crap from other wannabes), and L3 IS a Tier 1 provider. L3 thinks Cogent should be paying for dumping traffic on them, and Cogent thinks L3 should peer with them and pass their traffic down the line for no cost. Whichever company blinks first .. loses. If L3 blinks, they re-peer with Cogent, which gives Cogent more political power when it comes to other Tier 1s. If Cogent blinks first, they either send their packets via other Tier 1 providers to get to L3 or buy transit from L3. If Cogent blinks .. other Tier 1 providers are going to look at it and say 'hey, we could be making money too' and multiple instances of today will replay themselves out across the net.

Cogent's sells bandwidth for cheap ... too cheap to actually make any money at it, and now the house of cards is folding.

Re:Who to complain to at Level3

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah because (3) wants an flood of calls from a bunch of ignorant retards who believe reading /. makes them an authority on a topic. I am sure you can find other BF2 servers to play on, move along.

They did the right thing. Fuck Cogent.

I'm going to be rich...

[warrax_666]

when I invent a device that allows me to stab people in the face over the Internet.

Stupid rubbish

[frost22]

You utter stupid rubbish and have no clue yourself.

You confuse peering and transit. Cogent sending their L3 traffc via, say Verizon, would violate their peering agreement with Verizon. They would have to pay Verizon for transit/upstream. OTOH, in their case, L3 would not have to pay anything since they still peer with Verizon, and since now Cogent pays Verizon as upstream, Cogent would now be considered part of Verizons network for peering purposes with L3.

So, if Cogent blinks first, they would be forced to leave tier1 and raise their own traffic cost by paying for upstream, while L3 would'nt pay anything.

Right now L3 cutting the peering in fact does stop all traffic between their two network clouds, until one of them starts shelling out the money to get traffic flowing again.