I have it on good authority that Level 3 re-established it’s peering link with Cogent this afternoon. But what is starting to come to light is some of the reasons for the cut in the first place. As you will remember I slapped Level 3 pretty hard in a earlier post and on my podcast but this info may change your thoughts a little.
I want to run a scenario by you and let you draw your own conclusions, you and your neighbor are doing drive sharing but after many months of drive sharing, you are starting to get upset about the arrangement. It turns out you have been driving 12 days for every day that the person you are drive sharing with is . You then tell your neighbor formally in writing with as much as 70 days advance notice that if the situation did not change and if something was not done to alleviate the differential or re-negotiate the arrangements that the ride share was going to be terminated
The dilemma your faced with is this, you and that person have been driving a bus, and that bus has people from your company that needs to visit the person your sharing the driving duties with. So when you decide that you no longer want to share the drive duties and cut all ties with the other driver then people from your own company are now forced into taking alternate buses to your old driving partners location.
But it gets more complicated. Some of those buses have been going coast to coast and the person you have been drive sharing with has buses that also go coast to coast but to save gas, he has been loading buses up in New York for the long haul, instead of long hauling them to the west coast by himself on his own dime and then transferring them onto your bus for the final mile to your customer destination which has caused your buses to be full of traffic to the point of being overloaded.
As you can see in the above example I have tried to break down what is happening between Level 3 and Cogent in a model that most of you can understand. These few dynamics can cause a lot of issues compound that by the nature of the net and people wanting the net to work, and when it doesn’t then all hell breaks loose which causes people like me to start screaming in the night.
It gets worse and in my opinion criminal, if the company that has been cut off knew far in advance that the drive sharing was going to be terminated on the specified day it was and did not tell anyone, that in my opinion would make me pretty mad, if my company was loosing money during the great Internet blackout of 2005 and the company I was doing business with kne. I think I would actually go find me a pretty good lawyer and file some discovery motions to find out exactly what kind of correspondence was mailed and to whom to include e-mails.
Cogent rolled the dice and lost but Level 3 has given them a 30 day time frame to come play ball, Cogent has it’s back against the wall and are faced with paying a toll to get the data moved, which will impact their ability to undercut the competition.
My bottom line advise you better get multi-homed for any Internet Business you are going to do when your business model is built around moving data with Cogent.
Light Reading [Level 3 Press Release] [TechWorld] [Cogent Net Status] [Smoking Gun Comments look at the Date]