ISP Dispute Causing Connectivity Issues for Customers

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "A peering dispute between Telia and Cogent is causing routing and connectivity problems for many internet users. Cogent shut down their connections to Telia over what they described as a 'contract dispute' over the size and location of their peering points. Telia attempted to route around the problem, but Cogent blocked that, too. This has caused a lot of trouble for sites which are not multi-homed. Groklaw, for example, is on a Cogent network (MCNC.demarc.cogentco.com), so any Europeans connecting via Telia can't get through."

That's what happens...

This just goes to show you what happens when the money obsessed CEOs of corporations argue: The customers lose!

First post btw :)

Re:That's what happens...

The thought of them arguing is much less frightening to me than the thought of them holding hands and skipping through a field of daisies together. ...for a couple reasons.

How much for only half an Internet?

If I'm paying $50/month for Internet access, do I get half of that back if I can only get to half the Internet?

This isn't a silly question:
If YOU are the ISP, and YOUR actions are causing ME to not be able to get to SOMEONE ELSE, then my lawyers will try to hold YOU responsible.

Stupidity like this will cause both companies problems with their customers in court and in the marketplace.

Re:How much for only half an Internet?

Do you people even read your TOS? You are not guaranteed anything without an SLA.

Re:How much for only half an Internet?

The TOS won't always get them off the hook. Claims made in ads can be considered part of the contract, even if they are disavowed in the TOS.

Re:How much for only half an Internet?

After the Cogent/Level 3 spat a few years ago, smarter network engineers realized it wasn't safe to use either Cogent or Level 3 as their sole Internet provider. Second provider? Sure. But not sole.

After this Cogent/Telia spat, no one with a brain will pick Cogent as their sole Internet provider.

This won't hurt Cogent too deeply. They charge so little for bandwidth that it's hard to resist picking them as your #2.

Re:How much for only half an Internet?

They charge so little for bandwidth that it's hard to resist picking them as your #2.

Coincidentally, they've also chosen you for their #2.

Re:How much for only half an Internet?

All ISPs take you to the same internet, so why pay more than you have to! :)

Re:How much for only half an Internet?

If YOU are the ISP, and YOUR actions are causing ME to not be able to get to SOMEONE ELSE, then my lawyers will try to hold YOU responsible.

Are you a coder? It's just that your post resembles an SQL statement.

Re:How much for only half an Internet?

Stupidity like this will cause both companies problems with their customers in court and in the marketplace.

I don't think a few disgruntled Swedish users are going to have much of a legal or economic impact on Cogent. Telia certainly will suffer, but they're not the ones that pulled the plug. According to Cogent, this is all Telia's fault for not being a good peering partner. But there really ought to be a better way to settle this than disrupting Internet access for millions of people.

What really has me concerned is that Cogent is choosing to punish Telia beyond simply shutting down the peering points. They've blocked all traffic that originates from Telia's network even if it comes through a third network. Doesn't that violate their peering agreements with the third networks? And isn't it dangerously like censorship? Perhaps someone should ask the FCC.

Again?

Didn't this happen a few years back? Level3 and Cogent, IIRC

Re:Again?

Didn't this happen a few years back? Level3 and Cogent, IIRC

Wow. It's almost like you read the article or something...

Yep

Quite a house of cards our fragile infrastructure has become. Somebody says "bomb" in San Francisco, and your flight from Mobile to Nashville will be grounded. A disagreement over the price causes droughts and blackouts in California. And our super robust internet can cut off whole countries with the snip of a cable or a flip of a switch. That's no way to run a circus, I say.

This message was brought to you by... BIGCO...where the nose meets the grindstone.

Re:Yep

You'll notice that none of these are the faults of the technology, but the faults of the Humans (or lawyer/accountant equivalents).

This doesn't seem too crazy to me...

The Internet is built on cooperation. If two companies can't agree on how they will connect, then it seems they have that right. Just like their customers have the right to move to a different provider. Personally, if I was seriously affected by this I would never do business with either of the involved parties again. Hopefully people will leave and that will push them to negotiate, but I don't think they should be forced to work together if they don't want to.

Re:This doesn't seem too crazy to me...

You know, thats not true. In my area, I can choose Qwest DSL, charter cable, Clear-wire, small ISP's, etc. Every single one of them uses Qwest's fibers out of town. If Qwest gets into a spat with somebody, I can't access the internet, regardless of which ISP I am using locally. Keep in mind, I sit in a town that is on a main fiber route for williams, level 3, and a few others along the west coast, but none of them will sell any access locally. (were apparently too small of fish, which is a shame, williams cable has a set of buildings holding equipment about 100yards from where I am now sitting)

Internet is vital now...

There was a time when the Internet was more like a novelty or hobby project. Those of us using it were on the fringe, and nothing that we did on the 'net was vital.

That is no longer the case. The Internet has grown to become a vital infrastructure. Just about every business relies on the Internet to get their work done. It is an indispensable tool for students and academics. It has risen nearly to the status of roads or electrical power in terms of being depended upon by billions of people.

What's my point? My point is that with respect to most utilities (roads, water, electricity, phone) we wouldn't tolerate much interruption in service... and we certainly wouldn't accept companies squabbling as a decent excuse for degrading the infrastructure. Can you imagine driving to work one day and finding roads blocked because of a contract dispute?

I'm not sure what the answer is. Turning the Internet into a government utility has its own problems. Similarly, laws which require certain norms for the utility may be over-reaching or impotent. But, ultimately, we need to push for this critical infrastructure to no longer be treated as a best-effort hobby/entertainment service. We need companies (and possibly legislators?) to acknowledge that the Internet is critical, and that this means that uptime/bandwidth/QoS must be maintained at a high-level.

Re:Internet is vital now...

Can you imagine driving to work one day and finding roads blocked because of a contract dispute?

Why, yes I can — the government-owned New York subway was gripped by just such a problem [wikipedia.org] recently (in 2005). Millions of people were affected — getting to work was a nightmare...

In more Socialist countries (such as France) subway and other vital infrastructure is routinely shut down due to strikes (which are contract disputes between workers and employer). I was actually hit by such a strike myself — on that one week I was in Paris — and had to walk through the streets smelling of rotting garbage, because garbage collectors were on strike too — no kidding...

If people don't want to do their job for some reason, there is no way to force them. It was already illegal for New York transit to strike, but they did it anyway. For another example, when the policemen feel, they aren't treated nicely, they strike too. Although it is illegal for them to strike (obviously), you can not stop them from calling in sick (the special term is "Blue Flu [wikipedia.org]"). For yet another example, flight controllers can't strike either, yet they had to make Reagan famous by striking — and disabling an even more important part of the country's (world's!) infrastructure...

These things will happen...

Re:Internet is vital now...

Happens all the time in France.

Here in the UK we even have a special car park for when the French port workers strike:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Stack [wikipedia.org]

Operation Stack is the codename used by Kent Police and the Port of Dover in England to refer to the method of using sections of the M20 motorway in Kent to park lorries when the English Channel or Dover ports are blocked by bad weather or industrial action. It has been implemented over 75 times since its inception 20 years ago.

Re:Internet is vital now...

Um, the Internet is surely important, but I wouldn't suggest it is more critical to survival than roads or food

I would, because the organizations which provide us with food and other necessities are dependent upon the Internet. I doubt the average interstate trucking company would have any idea how to operate without the Internet and GPS. The entire supply chain is utterly dependent upon modern communications, from production to delivery. The tech just makes everything so damned efficient that we've largely forgotten how to get along without it. I think we're starting to see how dangerous that can be, given the caliber of the folks running said communications.

In any event, the way to handle the likes of AT&T/SBC, Comcast and the rest is very simple: it's called standards. That worked very well for the phone system for a hundred years: AT&T (the old AT&T) built out the most reliable communications system on the planet, but that's because they were a heavily-regulated monopoly which had enforced quality-of-service standards. Comcast and the rest can provide almost no service at all for what we pay them and they get away with it.

Unfortunately, the government itself is so corrupt that it's unlikely Congress would ever be able to implement any kind of ISP regulation that has teeth to it, much less enforce it. Hell, they fucking gave away some hundreds of billions of dollars to these assholes, and never bothered to ask for an accounting of where the hell it went.

Also affects WoW players...

Also no one playing World of Warcraft using Cogent as ISP can connect to any WoW servers, since Blizzard use Telia's backbone...
This is listed in-game in WoW currently at the login screen.

Tell it like it is: whoever's wrong, get over it

It's like an old telecom SS7 spat. Tell them to get over it. In three more days, we pull all our servers from and move on. Can't get to what we need? As ISPs, they have precious little time to figure it out, then we split. Go ahead, try and enforce that five-9's contract. Providers are everywhere, drooling for business. Bye-bye, blackout. Hello loneliness.

Also affects email traffic in the US & Europe

Since Cogent actively drops any traffic that's been even just in transit anywhere on the pretty big TeliaSonera International Carrier network [teliasoneraic.com] (it's a tier 1 net that covers all of the US and Europe), your email messages will just be held at some random backup email server for a couple of days until you'll get a return notice saying your message hasn't been delivered yet. If you're lucky that is.

For any important/urgent emails, you now need to make a follow-up phone call, just to see if the message was delivered. (Yes, you could request a receipt when the message is opened, but it's optional for the receiver to send the receipt and many don't).

I hope that ibiblio & the internet archive (archive.org) are moved away from their current hosting on Cogent's network, urgently.

Great timing to send urgent business email, normally delivered within seconds, only to find out that it has never been received. I do wonder if this active sabotage of 3rd party Internet traffic might be class-actionable. Of course e-mail is just a tiny part of the overall losses that 3rd parties suffer from this.

The need for BAPPs (Big-Ass Peering Pipes)

According to Wired, Cogent felt Telia didn't provide "fat enough pipes." The capacity of peering connections [datacenterknowledge.com] is becoming a point of tension in a growing number of peering relationships. Video traffic is driving strong demand for 10 gigabit Ethernet connections for peering, but some major ISPs are apparently reluctant to upgrade, asserting that the financial benefits of big-pipe peering don't offset the short-term expense of network upgrades needed to support 10gigE. The economics of peering is a tricky business sometimes, and video traffic is complicating the equation.

Re:Route around?

You're missing the fact that at the upper tiers of the internet, there are only so many routes available. There are simply somethings that can't be routed around because the ONLY route to where you want to go involves passing packets across the network you are trying to route around. Consider a smaller example. You want to route traffic to a Verizon DSL customer. Verizon has decided it doesn't want to pass your packets to the DSL customer. No matter how you try to route it, since Verizon sold the DSL service and controls the last few hops in the route, you simply can't route to the customer any other way.

The current issue involves "peering arrangements/agreements." Do a Google search if you want an in depth explination of what exactly a peering arrangement is all about. The short version is that ISPs agree to pass each others traffic across their networks. That's the way the internet works. Every ISP can't have a router in every place that a router needs to be placed. So they "share" each routes with each other.