Sprint, Cogent in Peering Feud > Carbonite

Carbonite

I'm supposing you're on a SprintLink T1 or some other such thing? Hopefully you're not in an Embarq market where they only have SprintLink uplinks.

Seems to me that Sprint is in a rather bad situation with regard to the peering dispute. They've sorta set themselves up for this, as has Cogent in a way. Cogent specializes in relatively short-loop, ultra-cheap access and, unlike Hurricane Electric etc., serves enough locations that a LOT of places have their links for web services. ISPs using Cogent are lower in number for exclusive use, but Comcast is a big customer, albeit multi-homed with Level3 and peered at various locations.

Sprint, on the other hand, started out as an ILEC, and thus has a lot of T1 and T3 lines to small businesses, small ISPs (in some cases, less now than earlier) and end-users, through what's left of Embarq backbone uplinks and their wireless division. From what I've heard Sprint doesn't really compete on price, though their global network is very highly ranked (not as high as AT&T though). Probably their biggest server-centric customer is InterNAP.

So, really, how is Cogent, by nature, going to receive much traffic from Sprint, when Sprint is chasing off cost-conscious users? No cable or fiber provider that I know of uses Sprint, so customers download significantly more than they upload, and the dearth of websites running non-L3, non-Cogent routes mean that Comcast users only have to go through Sprint if they want to check out Sprint's website, and then they can do it through Level3.

So basically until SprintLink cuts rates to get near those of L3, let alone Cogent, they're not going to get more webhost customers to even things out (not like Sprint wants to do that...that's Cogent territory). So Cogent has to find ISPs willing to use their network most of the time for consumer, asymmetric, internet access. TekSavvy does it with their unlimited plan options, otherwise there aren't really any. Most ISPs use Level3, AT&T, Qwest or Verizon for backbone connectivity.

Catch-22 am I right? As a customer of Sprint wireless service, I guess it's VPN time (either into my school network or my home network) to get to Cogent websites. As a Comcast cable subscriber, I don't care much, if any; Sprint-bound traffic just uses L3. Back home, n an ISP with Qwest as the backbone, I don't care; I'm not affected. I really can't think of how this adversely affects anyone but Sprint customers...not a good thing when Cogent is offering 100 Mbit connectivity for free for Sprint customers on-net...