As much as we blame Cogent and Sprint for breaking the internet, I also have
no sympathy for individual single-homed downstream customers on either
networks. If you are complaining about Sprint<->Cogent depeering and have
customers demanding for your mission-critical services, then you are just as
negligent to not have multihomed before all of this happened. If you need
that 100% uptime guarantee, you shouldn't rely on single carrier, nor should
you rely on government for more regulation. No one can help you but
yourself in ensuring your uptime-- so perhaps look at your own setup and
decide that you need that 2nd connection to back you up when first one
fails. This is a simple business logic.
Is it just me, or is this awful logic?
Really, we DO NOT WANT every site that considers itself to have "mission
critical needs" to be multihomed. This would lead to an explosion in the
size of the routing table.
When two "Tier 1 Wannabes" get into a peering dispute and start
deliberately breaking reachability, this is an artifically-generated
crisis.
It certainly strikes me that someone here isn't making "best-effort"
attempts to supply Internet access. One would wish that the customers
of that guilty party have contracts which require "best-effort" attempts
to provide Internet access, which would mean that a peering spat that
results in visible traffic failures ought to open the door for customers
to migrate ... elsewhere. Of course, while that might be fair, it isn't
compatible with the real world.
However, requiring everyone to get a second Internet connection is not
realistic.
... JG