DrTCP
Yours truly
Premium,ExMod 1999-04
join:1999-11-09
Round Rock, TX
| AOL has the right!
I think peering should be mutually beneficial to both parties. Although I am not a big fan of AOL, in this case, AOL is carrying a lot more transit traffic for Cogent than the traffic originating from or destined to AOL.
Who would want to provide free upstream connection while other smaller ISP's are paying the likes of Level3, AT&T etc. to carry their traffic? This is business and I can understand why AOL does not want to suck the extra costs when it is not getting significant benefit from this peering.
If it was that both AOL and Cogent had mutually equal or close to equal benefit from this private peering then yes, AOL would be at fault and actually it would hurt its own customers significantly but that is not the case.
Well, cogent should either pay AOL or find another peering point. The ball is really at Cogent. |
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Jerm
join:2000-04-10
Richland, WA
|  Re: AOL has the right! - bingo yes they do!
I think some people don't fully understand what was happening in this situation.
Cogent customers were downloading much more from AOL sites (ie CNN) than AOL users were downloading from Cogent (which hosts what? not much).
Say you have a DSL line, and you host a website. Do you think you should get that DSL line for free just because you host a website? No. Cogent was using AOL bandwidth (bw is not free people). Cogent should pay for the bandwidth they use.
For those who don't know, Cogent is the Wal-mart of bandwidth providers. You get a 100mbit fiber connection to their network for $1000 a month (they claim its non-oversubscribed also).
The only reason Cogent stays afloat is because of their favorable peering agreements (AOL probably isn't that only ISP dealing with unfair traffic amounts when it comes to Cogent).
On a side note Cogent would stay afloat if they got more colleges online that used Kaazaa and those peer to peer programs. Those things will eat as much upload as possible 
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mdurkin
join:1999-08-11
San Bruno, CA
| said by Jerm  :
I think some people don't fully understand what was happening in this situation.
Cogent customers were downloading much more from AOL sites (ie CNN) than AOL users were downloading from Cogent (which hosts what? not much).
That's exactly opposite of where peering disputes arise. The ISP that receives more traffic wants to get paid. So AOL users would be downloading more from Cogent. It has to do with the fact that most ISPs use hot potato routing, ie. Cogent would handoff their outbound traffic destined for AOL customers as soon as possible and AOL winds up hauling it across country (and there are technical pluses to doing that since it tends to reduce the chance you will go from SF to NY and back to SF... AOL has much more detail about where its own customers ultimately are than can be practically exchanged via BGP), as well as the fact that ISPs can get more money for webhost bandwidth than they can for access bandwidth. |
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Jerm
join:2000-04-10
Richland, WA | Your right...
I'm slightly lisdexic (dislexic) and type it backwards even though I meant the other way around! |
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