I'd like to peer with all tier 1's, they are thus all bad as
they won't.
HE decided they want to be transit free for v6 and set out on
a campaign of providing free tunnels/transit/peering to establish
this. Cogent, for all their faults, are free to not accept the
offer.
Can the Cogent bashing stop now, save it for when they do something
properly bad.
brandon
I hear you.
Taken to extremes, I can see how the argument sounds like that.
However… I have some thoughts on what you’ve said.
Most of us would never get peerings to all the Tier 1s.
But…
Hurricane Electric already has IPv6 peering to every network that matters, save for Cogent’s. Every other accepted Tier 1 peers with HE on IPv6. Even SPRINT. If we got back historically, they (Sprint) were among the most coveted and hardest to get IP peerings. Even they recognized HE’s dominance of the IPv6 space early on.
I’m not bashing Cogent. I’m a customer of theirs and they’ve generally served me well. The trouble I have in accepting Cogent’s behavior in this matter is that it just seems irrational. If a typical, public forum peering dispute arose between HE & Cogent regarding IPv6, frankly and pretty objectively, you’d expect it to be Hurricane Electric questioning the value of peering Cogent IPv6 rather than Cogent questioning HE.
I don’t question these parties’ rights not to peer, but I do question the logic behind it. I think Cogent is hurting themselves on this more than HE is getting hurt by it.
Selling a service that is considered internet but does not deliver full
internet access is generally considered properly bad.
I would not do business with either company, since neither of them provide
a full view.
CB
I note that if IPv6 was actually important, neither one could have gotten away with it for so long.
Matthew Kaufman
An excellent point. Nobody would tolerate this in IPv4 land. Those disputes tended to end in days and weeks (sometimes months), but not years.
That said, as IPv6 is finally gaining traction, I suspect we’ll be seeing less tolerance for this behavior.
pop your popcorn...
* Ca By <cb.list6@gmail.com>
Selling a service that is considered internet but does not deliver
full internet access is generally considered properly bad.I would not do business with either company, since neither of them
provide a full view.
+1
Both networks are in a position to easily remedy the situation if they
were pragmatically inclined. For example, Cogent could simply accept
HE's offer to peer; HE could simply pick up Cogent's IPv6 routes from
their existing transit provider TSIC.
Instead they both choose to continue their game of chicken to the
detriment of both of their customer bases.
Fortunately there's no shortage of competitors to HE and Cogent who
prioritise providing connectivity higher than engaging in such
nonsense. Vote with your wallets, folks.
Tore
You are, of course, entitled to your opinion and I assure you that I am fully cognizant of
the fact that HE is not without its faults.
However, I think your description of the scenario is rather heavily skewed, especially
when you consider that Cogent is basically the only remaining major (I find it hard
to call them a tier 1 given their behavior) provider that still refuses SFI of any form
with HE.
Owen
Was part of my first peering spat, probably 95/96 since then many more,
couple even big enough they made nanog/ industry news, end of day they are
all the same. If you need to reach every where have more then one provider,
it's good practice anyway, a single cust or even a bunch of cust are NOT
going to influence peer decisions, so build your network so any 2 sides not
playing not, will not impact you cust's, so at least they don't have reason
to complain to you.
-jim
Motivated sales departments always get whatever they want. Always. If they aren't getting what they (or you as customer) want, they aren't motivated enough.
Correct.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: an ISP's refusal to
maintain a settlement-free open peering policy is directly linked with
said company's fraudulent double-billing for services.
In case you don't see it, I'll explain: whatever fictions you may tell
yourselves, your customers pay you to connect them to the entire
Internet. So do the other guy's customers. Settlement free peering
means that at no _additional_ charge to anyone, you accept the packets
your customers have paid you to accept from the other guy's customers.
And vice versa. Peering does not trade packets you haven't been paid
for. That's another fiction. Peering only trades packets one of your
customers has paid you for.
I get from there to double-billing because the alternative to
settlement free peering is a paid relationship. The other guy has to
buy from you directly (becoming the second payer for each packet) or
he has to buy from one of the peers you've accepted But the peers
you've accepted are constrained by ratios an related technical
requirements which functionally prevent them from adding a sizable
amount of traffic from that other guy, so unless he's doing a trifling
business he pretty much has to buy service from you. Even though
another customer has already paid you to perform that activity, you
refuse to do the job unless the second party also becomes your
customer and pays you. Fraud. Hidden behind a wall of technical
minutiae but fraud all the same.
Don't get me wrong. You can cure this fraud without going to extremes.
An open peering policy doesn't require you to buy hardware for the
other guy's convenience. Let him reimburse you or procure the hardware
you spec out if he wants to peer. Nor do you have to extend your
network to a location convenient for the other guy. Pick neutral
locations where you're willing to peer and let the other guy build to
them or pay you to build from there to him. Nor does an open peering
policy require you to give the other guy a free ride on your
international backbone: you can swap packets for just the regions of
your network in which he's willing to establish a connection. But not
ratios and traffic minimums -- those are not egalitarian, they're
designed only to exclude the powerless.
Taken in this context, the Cogent/HE IPv6 peering spat is very simple:
Cogent is -the- bad actor. 100%.
Regards,
Bill Herrin
Bill,
I find that I agree with much of what you’ve said.
If we further constrain the arguments that you set forth so as to cover only that traffic which the customers of the two networks would be able to exchange in any event, by way of transit services purchased by one or the other of the two networks, then I agree wholeheartedly, at least on a purely logical basis.
In that instance, the traffic is exchanged regardless (though often over links that saturate at peaks) and furthermore at additional expense to one or both of the networks involved.
From a logical perspective, if two networks will permit their subscribers to exchange data, why would those two networks not elect the least cost, highest quality mechanism for exchanging that traffic?
I can only think of economic reasons, and specifically the hope for potential revenue from the other networks’ customer, because the parties have been unable to exchange data reliably over congested transit links.
Look, for example, to what was quite obviously the intentional peak-period congestion on various Comcast transit and peering links.
I’ve personally acted in a technical and administrative capacity in helping clients of mine (voice service providers) add private paid peering / paid customer links into Comcast just to overcome voice quality issues during peak periods resulting from clearly congested transit and peering links. It was obvious during those arrangements that Comcast had chosen to allow those links to congest as a policy matter in order to extract additional revenue by charging desperate “new customers” a premium toll for access to their subscribers behind the wall-of-congestion.
What’s fundamentally different in this IPv6 only Hurricane Electric <-> Cogent matter is that rather than have the traffic flow via transit (whether congested or not), there is quite simply no path between those two IPv6 networks. Hurricane Electric, clearly the IPv6 leader refuses to engage in the purchase of transit services for IPv6, and Cogent refuses to peer with HE on either protocol no matter what. Thus, no flow of traffic between the two networks on IPv6.
Presumably Cogent’s policy is mostly about denying Hurricane Electric to the “Tier 1” club, on IPv6 that ship has sailed. Let’s face it: when the really tough Tier 1s are peering with you (like Sprint, Level 3, AT&T), you’re in. Even Sprint peers with HE on IPv6 (though they do not on IPv4). Honestly, I think Cogent is the only hold-out. At least the only one that matters.
In as far as HE maintains an open peering policy both for IPv4 and IPv6, it’s clear that Cogent is the bad actor, denying their customers a path to Hurricane Electric customers. I think the only reason this has been tolerated so far is that IPv6 has been a fringe matter until now. Even today it’s a minority of network traffic, but it’s gaining fast.
If I were Cogent, I’d be more worried about denying my customers access to HE’s IPv6 network than the other way around.
Matt Hardeman
Nope. Most user-facing apps are in support of Happy Eyeballs.
When Facebook's FB.ME was down on IPv6 just a short while ago in 2013,
it took DAYS for anyone to notice.
http://puck.nether.net/pipermail/outages/2013-May/005571.html
Lots of popular sites publish AAAA with non-reachable services all the
time, and still noone notices to this day.
The old school command line tools are the only ones affected. One may
also notice it with `ssh -D` SOCKS5 proxying, but only if one's
browser doesn't decide to leak out hostname resolution and operate
directly with IPv4-addresses to start with, like Chrome does.
Cheers,
Constantine.SU.
While I agree it’s still going to be a while before it becomes a critical issue, more and more environments are going IPv6 first with IPv4 as a NAT’ed service…
I think the mobile carriers are going to be the ones to really push adoption.
William,
Don't get me wrong. You can cure this fraud without going to extremes.
An open peering policy doesn't require you to buy hardware for the
other guy's convenience. Let him reimburse you or procure the hardware
you spec out if he wants to peer. Nor do you have to extend your
network to a location convenient for the other guy. Pick neutral
locations where you're willing to peer and let the other guy build to
them or pay you to build from there to him. Nor does an open peering
policy require you to give the other guy a free ride on your
international backbone: you can swap packets for just the regions of
your network in which he's willing to establish a connection. But not
ratios and traffic minimums -- those are not egalitarian, they're
designed only to exclude the powerless.Taken in this context, the Cogent/HE IPv6 peering spat is very simple:
Cogent is -the- bad actor. 100%.
I'm curious: How do you know that Cogent didn't offer to peer under
terms such as the ones you mention, but that those were refused by HE?
Tore
"I've said it before and I'll say it again: an ISP's refusal to
maintain a settlement-free open peering policy is directly linked with
said company's fraudulent double-billing for services."
aaannnddd.. I'm done with that post.
Have you never seen the photos of the "Cogent (AS 174) Pleas IPv6 Peer
With Us" cake?
Just a random find of the day from the image search:
http://assets.fiercemarkets.net/files/telecom/fierceimages/cogent_cake.jpg
http://www.fiercetelecom.com/special-reports/six-faces-ipv6/owen-delong-hurricane-electric-evangelizing-ipv6-and-challenges-ahead
Also, I would guess not many people realise it, but HE.net actually
offers FREE IPv6 transit, including free international IPv6 transit,
e.g., if you don't need any IPv4 somehow, then you can get away with
NOT paying ANYTHING for your transit! E.g., one can't possibly have a
more open of a peering policy than HE!
And from what I've been told, they supposedly don't even limit this to
the tunnels, so you can even have an IC, too, even without paying them
for any IPv4 transit, either (of course, HE being a value provider, I
guess it's rather unlikely that anyone has such asymmetrical setups,
however).
C.
Because Cogent has repeatedly stated that they refuse to peer, period?
Doug
