Arrogance is the only reason I can think of why the incumbents think that way. 
I'd be surprised if any competitive providers (regardless of their market 
dominance) would expect free peering. 




----- 
Mike Hammett 
Intelligent Computing Solutions 
http://www.ics-il.com 



Midwest Internet Exchange 
http://www.midwest-ix.com 


----- Original Message -----

From: "Owen DeLong" <o...@delong.com> 
To: "Matthew Huff" <mh...@ox.com> 
Cc: nanog@nanog.org 
Sent: Saturday, August 15, 2015 11:44:57 AM 
Subject: Re: net neutrality peering dispute between CenturyTel/Qwest and Cogent 
in Dallas 

This issue isn’t limited to Cogent. 

There is this bizarre belief by the larger eyeball networks (and CC, VZ, and TW 
are the worst offenders, pretty much in that order) that they are entitled to 
be paid by both the content provider _AND_ the eyeball user for carrying bits 
between the two. 

In a healthy market, the eyeball providers would face competition and the 
content providers would simply ignore these demands and the eyeballs would buy 
from other eyeball providers. 

Unfortunately, especially in the US, we don’t have a healthy market. In the 
best of circumstances, we have oligopolies and in the worst places, we have 
effective (or even actual) monopolies. 

For example, in the area where I live, the claim you will hear is that there is 
competition. With my usage patterns, that’s a choice between Comcast (up to 
30/7 $100/mo), AT&T DSL (1.5M/384k $40/mo+) and wireless (Up to 30/15 
$500+/month). 

I’m not in some rural backwater or even some second-tier metro. I’m within 10 
miles of the former MAE West and also within 10 miles of Equinix SV1 (11 Great 
Oaks). There’s major fiber bundles within 2 miles of my house. I’m near US101 
and Capitol Expressway in San Jose. 

The reason that things are this way, IMHO, is because we have allowed 
“facilities based carriers” to leverage the monopoly on physical infrastructure 
into a monopoly for services over that infrastructure. 

The most viable solution, IMHO, is to require a separation between physical 
infrastructure providers and those that provide services over that 
infrastructure. Breaking the tight coupling between the two and requiring 
physical infrastructure providers to lease facilities to operators on an equal 
footing for all operators will reduce the barriers to competition in the 
operator space. It will also make limited competition in the facilities space 
possible, though unlikely. 

This model exists to some extent in a few areas that have municipal residential 
fiber services, and in most of those localities, it is working well. 

That’s one of the reasons that the incumbent facilities based carriers have 
lobbied so hard to get laws in states where a city has done this that prevent 
other cities from following suit. 

Fortunately, one of the big gains in recent FCC rulings is that these laws are 
likely to be rendered null and void. 

Unfortunately, there is so much vested interest in the status quo that 
achieving this sort of separation is unlikely without a really strong grass 
roots movement. Sadly, the average sound-bite oriented citizen doesn’t know (or 
want to learn) enough to facilitate such a grass-roots movement, so if we want 
to build such a future, we have a long slog of public education and recruitment 
ahead of us. 

In the mean time, we’ll get to continue to watch companies like CC, VZ, TW 
screw over their customers and the content providers their customers want to 
reach for the sake of extorting extra money from both sides of the transaction. 

Owen 

> On Aug 15, 2015, at 06:40 , Matthew Huff <mh...@ox.com> wrote: 
> 
> It's only partially about net neutrality. Cogent provides cheap bandwidth for 
> content providers, and sends a lot of traffic to eyeball networks. In the 
> past, peering partners expected symmetrical load sharing. Cogent feels that 
> eyeball networks should be happy to carry their traffic since the customers 
> want their services, the eyeball networks want Cogent to pay them extra. When 
> there is congestion, neither side wants to upgrade their peeing until this is 
> resolved, so they haven't. This has been going on for at least 5 years, and 
> happens all over the cogent peering map. 
> 
> Depending on what protocol you are using, it can be an issue or not. Our end 
> users on eyeball networks had difficulty maintaining VPN connections. We had 
> to drop our Cogent upstream and work with our remaining upstream provides to 
> traffic engineer around Cogent. YMMV. 
> 
> 
> 
> ---- 
> Matthew Huff | 1 Manhattanville Rd 
> Director of Operations | Purchase, NY 10577 
> OTA Management LLC | Phone: 914-460-4039 
> aim: matthewbhuff | Fax: 914-694-5669 
> 
> -----Original Message----- 
> From: NANOG [mailto:nanog-boun...@nanog.org] On Behalf Of Jordan Hamilton 
> Sent: Friday, August 14, 2015 5:31 PM 
> To: nanog@nanog.org 
> Subject: net neutrality peering dispute between CenturyTel/Qwest and Cogent 
> in Dallas 
> 
> I have several customers that are having packet loss issues, the packet loss 
> appears to be associated with a Cogent router interface of 38.104.86.222. My 
> upstream provider is telling me that the packet loss is being caused by a net 
> neutrality peering dispute between CenturyTel/Quest and Cogent in Dallas. I 
> did some quick googling to see if I could come up with any articles or 
> something like that I could provide to my customers and did not see anything. 
> Anyone know any details? 
> 
> Thanks 
> 
> Jordan Hamilton 
> Senior Telecommunications Engineer 
> 
> Empire District Electric Co. 
> 720 Schifferdecker 
> PO Box 127 
> Joplin, MO 64802 
> 
> Ph: 417-625-4223 
> Cell: 417-388-3351 
> 
> 
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