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bistro777
Donuts-Is There Anything They Can't Do?
Premium
join:2002-02-07
Englewood, CO
| reply to JakCrow
Re: A simple business decision
Always good to hear from "the Cogent contingent."  (BTW, I am familiar with BGP and peering, thank you.)
I just find it ironic that Cogent cries foul when Cogent, itself, has inbound/outbound traffic constraints for its own customers. Sorry, but when one party is being disadvantaged in a peering arrangement, it usually has the right to terminate it. (And this wasn't Cogent's first experience - ask those in the know about the Sprint/PSINet/NetRail peering terminations with Cogent.)
"If I didn't kick Bill Clinton's ass every day, he wouldn't be worth anything." - - Hillary Rodham Clinton, 1980. | |
rodrod5
join:2001-02-28
Houston, TX
| reply to mdurkin
said by mdurkin  :
It's not that simple. There are legitimate reasons why a provider receiving more traffic on an interconnection like AOL apparently is would want settlements. With the typical hot-potato routing, Cogent would be pushing their outbound traffic destined for AOL out the nearest peering connection, and AOL would be hauling that traffic across the country in many cases. It's difficult to exchange enough detail with BGP so that Cogent could know where AOL's destination customer is located to move the traffic closer; if they get it wrong then they can wind up moving traffic from Cogent in San Francisco to Chicago only for it to be delivered to an AOL customer in San Francisco. Hot potato gives the packets to the ISP best positioned to know where their own customer is as soon as possible and route it most efficiently, but it means the receiving ISP tends to move the packets farther. This is the same reason why many large ISPs will not peer with other ISPs unless they meet them at at least 3-5 peering points in several diverse geographic locations around the country.
The other major factor is the simple fact that ISPs can get more money from web hosting customers than they can from access customers--in this situation, AOL is the access provider and Cogent is the hoster. Not withstanding the fact that Cogent is flat-rate (and don't forget that Cogent's own customer contracts have requirements that customers maintain no worse than certain ratios of outbound:inbound traffic), AOL and most other ISPs likely get more revenue per Mbps from hosting customers than from access customers.
cogent makes the exact opposite statement of yours in this article »www.isp-planet.com/business/2003···ing.html
""Cogent argues that AOL doesn't have a network to speak of, thus while Cogent does send a lot of traffic to AOL it is all local, whereas AOL's traffic typically has to travel long distances on Cogent's network, costing Cogent a pretty penny.""
Cogent is different from many truly second tier ISPs since it controls a large national fiber optic backbone. Thus, a settlement with AOL could include some kind of barter where Cogent would offer AOL national transit at below market prices. ..... This sounds like a shake down to me
[text was edited by author 2003-01-24 19:34:35] | |
mdurkin
join:1999-08-11
San Bruno, CA
| reply to JakCrow
said by JakCrow :
said by bistro777 :
So, on the face of it, this looks like a simple business decision regarding an unequal partnership. If you and I carpool, and I do it 3x as often as you and pay 3x the gas and tolls, wouldn’t anyone else call that an unequal arrangement? Cogent needs to join the real world of peering plus build-out its network a bit instead of crying about this. (And AOL is not the only company to have called-off peering arrangements with them – look at Sprint/PSINet/Netrail.)
The idea of -paying- another party to peer with them is ridiculous. For your information, Cogent IS in the real world of peering. It's companies like AOL who think its shit don't stink when it tries to charge peers for the supposed "privilege" of passing traffic between networks, when it's really free bandwidth.
BTW: Peering does not shovel off a company's traffic to someone else. It means that traffic between networks is the smallest possible route and doesn't use transit provider bandwidth, like if someone on Cogent's network wants to look up a website that's on AOL's network, the traffic goes straight to and back from AOL instead of going over some other route. Most honest companies peer at common points of presence with others. Peering costs NOTHING, and in fact, is a cost benefit to ALL PARTIES INVOLVED. AOL is trying to charge someone for saving them money, regardless of the "imbalance" in the peering traffic (which, again, costs them nothing).
[text was edited by author 2003-01-24 17:15:15]
It's not that simple. There are legitimate reasons why a provider receiving more traffic on an interconnection like AOL apparently is would want settlements. With the typical hot-potato routing, Cogent would be pushing their outbound traffic destined for AOL out the nearest peering connection, and AOL would be hauling that traffic across the country in many cases. It's difficult to exchange enough detail with BGP so that Cogent could know where AOL's destination customer is located to move the traffic closer; if they get it wrong then they can wind up moving traffic from Cogent in San Francisco to Chicago only for it to be delivered to an AOL customer in San Francisco. Hot potato gives the packets to the ISP best positioned to know where their own customer is as soon as possible and route it most efficiently, but it means the receiving ISP tends to move the packets farther. This is the same reason why many large ISPs will not peer with other ISPs unless they meet them at at least 3-5 peering points in several diverse geographic locations around the country.
The other major factor is the simple fact that ISPs can get more money from web hosting customers than they can from access customers--in this situation, AOL is the access provider and Cogent is the hoster. Not withstanding the fact that Cogent is flat-rate (and don't forget that Cogent's own customer contracts have requirements that customers maintain no worse than certain ratios of outbound:inbound traffic), AOL and most other ISPs likely get more revenue per Mbps from hosting customers than from access customers. | |
Buck Fush
Great Minds With Great Debts.
join:2001-02-24
| reply to JakCrow
Even though you made it clear, I would bet that people will still confuse this peering arrangement with transit.
Down here, our major cities have their on IX(Internet Exchanges) which simply link all the ISPs in a city, TORIX is a fine example of that in the Toronto(Canada) area. We have so many DSL resellers down here, and most of them are linked using TORIX( »www.torix.ca/?data=peers ) so their traffic to each other doesn't have to go through a transit carrier. At times, we visit sites, say Bell Nexxia(don't peer with TORIX), which happens to be in the city I am in, and my routing takes me to TO--}CH--}TO--}Nexxia which I think is just lame when both things are in the same city, thats where Peering makes sense. Here's an example
...
5 25 ms 26 ms 25 ms chx-edge-01.inet.qwest.net [65.121.248.101]
6 25 ms 26 ms 26 ms chi-core-03.inet.qwest.net [205.171.220.13]
7 25 ms 26 ms 27 ms chi-brdr-03.inet.qwest.net [205.171.20.142]
8 25 ms 30 ms 26 ms bx2-chicago23-pos2-0.in.bellnexxia.net [206.108.108.197]
9 25 ms 29 ms 26 ms core2-chicago23-pos10-3.in.bellnexxia.net [206.108.103.121]
10 36 ms 36 ms 36 ms core3-toronto63-pos6-3.in.bellnexxia.net [206.108.103.113]
11 37 ms 37 ms 37 ms core2-torontodc-pos3-0.in.bellnexxia.net [206.108.98.250]
12 37 ms 37 ms 38 ms dis4-torontodc-Vlan82.in.bellnexxia.net [206.108.104.30]
...
[text was edited by author 2003-01-24 19:14:14]
[text was edited by author 2003-01-24 19:16:20] | |
haylo756
join:2002-11-08
Kansas City, MO
clubs:
|  reply to JakCrow
JakCrow, It's good that you pointed out the mutual benefits of peering early in this discussion. But let's just see how many people read or understand how peering before opining on the subject of this article.
I'm sure there are a lot of great folks using AOL, however in my experience as a webmaster I have had probably 75% of my problems with AOL users, be it technical or otherwise. It wouldn't terribly hurt me if AOL just went away | |
JakCrow
join:2001-12-06
Palo Alto, CA
| reply to bistro777
said by bistro777 :
So, on the face of it, this looks like a simple business decision regarding an unequal partnership. If you and I carpool, and I do it 3x as often as you and pay 3x the gas and tolls, wouldn’t anyone else call that an unequal arrangement? Cogent needs to join the real world of peering plus build-out its network a bit instead of crying about this. (And AOL is not the only company to have called-off peering arrangements with them – look at Sprint/PSINet/Netrail.)
The idea of -paying- another party to peer with them is ridiculous. For your information, Cogent IS in the real world of peering. It's companies like AOL who think its shit don't stink when it tries to charge peers for the supposed "privilege" of passing traffic between networks, when it's really free bandwidth.
BTW: Peering does not shovel off a company's traffic to someone else. It means that traffic between networks is the smallest possible route and doesn't use transit provider bandwidth, like if someone on Cogent's network wants to look up a website that's on AOL's network, the traffic goes straight to and back from AOL instead of going over some other route. Most honest companies peer at common points of presence with others. Peering costs NOTHING, and in fact, is a cost benefit to ALL PARTIES INVOLVED. AOL is trying to charge someone for saving them money, regardless of the "imbalance" in the peering traffic (which, again, costs them nothing).
[text was edited by author 2003-01-24 17:15:15] | |
bistro777
Donuts-Is There Anything They Can't Do?
Premium
join:2002-02-07
Englewood, CO
| From the Washington Post article earlier this month - - - “The disconnection occurred after AOL said Cogent did not meet the necessary requirements to merit a free, dedicated connection to the AOL network. The relationship was unequal, AOL said; AOL was carrying three times as much data traffic back to its customers as Cogent was to its customers. Normally, AOL agrees to carry no more than double its traffic, or else it charges for the dedicated connection, officials at the Internet service provider said.”
So, on the face of it, this looks like a simple business decision regarding an unequal partnership. If you and I carpool, and I do it 3x as often as you and pay 3x the gas and tolls, wouldn’t anyone else call that an unequal arrangement? Cogent needs to join the real world of peering plus build-out its network a bit instead of crying about this. (And AOL is not the only company to have called-off peering arrangements with them – look at Sprint/PSINet/Netrail.)
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