Sprint de-partitions internet Sprint-Nextel has reinstated the net connections it supplies to Cogent Communications, three days after severing ties with the bandwidth provider and leaving many net users unable to communicate. But the company says the move is only "temporary." On Thursday, October 30, after a long contractual dispute between the two outfits …
My provider doesn't peer with Sprint, and never did, yet somehow I can still reach Sprint customers. A traceroute shows XO Communications providing the transit. It's like a series of tubes! So why can't Cogent just get some other transit to Sprint while it re-negotiates its peering relationship? Because Cogent is bollocks, isn't it? Sprint should have told Cogent to shove off and go buy some transit.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYd-1rpWhw8
You might think that large ISPs like Sprint would be run by more or less responsible people.
I mean we are talking about peering. Peering doesn't actually cost anything, they just agree that they will exchange packets at POPs they are both present. Sprint doesn't save any money by doing that. In fact it will probably cost them money when their customers leave. I wonder when lawsuits against Sprint will come in. Actively disconnecting connections because of such childish issues is definitely not "best effort".
Well look at that, an Anonymous Coward posting what appears to be the Sprint party line.
On the off chance that you don't receive your paychecks from Sprint, and are just running your mouth about something you don't understand, perhaps you should check out the earlier article from when Sprint first pulled this crap. Sprint didn't just pull the plug - they're not routing Cogent addresses, period. This means that they are actively killing Cogent address space in their routing tables, which would stop packets from flowing between Sprint and Cogent across ANY network. It's also a dumbass thing to do. If I were a customer of theirs, I would consider this a breach of contract and notify them of my intention to cancel service - and if they tried to charge me a fee for doing so, they would be receiving a nastygram from my attorney.
-Daniel
Well, the AC comment might be one sided but so is yours. It seems you overlook how "teh Intartubes" actually work; Sprint is not "blocking" any Cogent prefixes. Cogent is a Tier 1 and so doesn't want to use transit providers. You can call that arrogant or not, but that's probably a part of their business model. Without a direct connection from Cogent to Sprint, the Sprint networks will never learn of Cogents existence, since Cogent doesn't want to pay any other providers for transporting traffic destined for them. (Which is what "transit" is.)
And according to Sprint, they actually did give prior notice to Cogent.
I can't say who's the bigger idiot, but I'm glad I'm not a customer of any of them. :-)
OK, so being a true Tier-1 and having 100% of traffic based on private peering is a good thing, but not having any kind of backup transit (big pipes, no commit on bandwidth) so at least you can get a full routing table from someone else in an emergency seems very short sighted. Unless they don't want their customers to communicate with the other parties network for the purposes of commercial gain, which seems a bit like holding your customers to ransom to me..
Sometimes it does make sense to buy transit from a Tier-2 provider, so long as they have built a sensible network.
But that's just what the Internet is: A lot of private peerings agreements. Of course you could always "just" buy an "Internet" connection from some provider and forget about the details, but the Internet was always just a bunch of agreements between different companies, at least when you reach the Tier 1 and Tier 2 providers.
Someone has propably started talking about regulating this, seeing how the current situation is unwanted, but "regulation" and "Internet" haven't mixed so far, so who knows what will happen...
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