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join:2000-08-14
Orange, CA Reviews:
 ·RoadRunner Cable
| For the uninformed and/or interested Cogent has never been a Tier 1, they have only been "transit free". Being transit free is not a difficult accomplishment, it just means that you don't announce or receive routes via a relationship which is intended to be heard by the entire Internet. You could easily go out and buy transit from each of the existing transit free networks, tag your routes with communities to only announce to customers, and become a "transit free" network with global reachability overnight. Of course, this carries with it the risk of breaking global Internet connectivity in the event of a depeering. It is well known that Cogent pays for out-of-ratio traffic with Level3 and Telia, and clearly Sprint says that they have no actual peering agreement. This doesn't have the making of a real tier 1 network.
Cogent has been actually stealing service from Sprint (and have been for over a year) in order to maintain their status. They used a "trial"
peering session to weasel their way into a direct connection with Sprint, and once they got it they intentionally changed their announcements so that if Sprint disconnected them it would cause unreachability.
It seems abundantly clear that this situation was created entirely by Cogent, and that they are intentionally harming their customers and the customers of Sprint in an effort to extort a settlement free relationship.
This is despicable behavior, if not outright criminal activity considering the theft of service they are committing, and it is amazing that Sprint cared enough about Internet connectivity to allow it to continue for so long, and to restore connectivity temporarily.
If any of us stopped paying for our Internet service, and set up routing so that as soon as our provider turned us off we would be reachable to them and their customers complained, then demanded that they give us free service in order to restore connectivity, we would be laughed at. That is what Cogent has done here, and just because they've done it on a large scale doesn't make it right. This specific issue will be solved in a real court and not the court of public opinion, but we should all do our parts to recognize the blatant lies Cogent has told, and to make it clear that we will not accept that kind of behavior. The last thing the Internet needs is more misguided regulation because someone actually believed Cogent's lies. |
