The detailed statement from Sprint provides the long awaited point of view from their side of things. The facts (as seen by Sprint) include a one to one comparison of the statements made by Cogent and how Sprint sees things:

- On october 30th, they indeed disconnected the final two interconnects, but this was only the last step of disconnecting all of the originally existing 10 interconnects. The started the process of disconnecting those 10 circuits on October 7th, so it was hardly a surprise for Cogent.

- Sprint confirms yet again that both parties entered a trial peering agreement in September 2006, which ended in September 2007.

- Sprint filed a lawsuit on September 2nd against Cogent for breach of contract due to Cogent refusal to pay Sprint for the ongoing connection to the Sprint network. Sprint also provided Cogent with a 30 days advance notice of the disconnection.

It will be interesting to see what the final outcome of this will be, since as mentioned above, the reconnection is only temporary.

The view from Cogent is rather different. Dave Schaeffer (CEO, Cogent) is quoted at The Register: “We were notified by Sprint that they wished to change the method of measuring utilization” and “We protested and explained that this was in violation of the agreement.”

Both companies are currently at curt over this issue, which will certainly not help in a fast resolution of the issue.

Update: Om Malik (GigaOM) has also picked the story up in a blog post and provides some further information.

What started as with a few messages on several ISP focused mailing-lists has been confirmed by Cogent in a press release today: Sprint-Nextel and Cogent have interrupted their peering connections, and as such customers from both networks can no longer reach the other network.

As a lot of you know, this is not the first time Cogent has been in the middle of a peering dispute, and so far, with no information from Sprint-Nextel on the matter, it is unclear what the reason behind the issue is, and who actually started the trouble.

Update: Head over to the Renesys blog to get Todd Underwoods detailed analysis of the situation. As always, worth reading. Their data gives details about the number of networks which are affected by this dispute:
- 289 autonomous systems are single homed behind Cogent
- 214 autonomous systems are single homed behind Sprint
All of these networks are currently not able to reach each other!

Randy Epstein (President, WV Fiber) informed the readers of the NANOG mailing list that the WV Fiber network (AS19151) is currently also affected by this since they only contract with Sprint for Transit, and is settlement free with the rest of its peers, which doesn’t include Cogent anymore since late last year when Cogent depeered AS19151 for unknown reason.

Update 2: Further information can be found in an article at the Arbor Networks blog, giving also an idea of the amount of traffic exchanged between AS174 and AS1239. But still, no information has surfaced so far about the actual cause of the de-peering.

The lyrics along with a links to the mentioned “events” can be found at the Renesys blog.

Looking forward to whoever will be the next in the series of performing a new version of American Pie!

The video is over half an hour long and filled with information and insights into the workings of Rackspace and the Datacenter industry in general.
Robert Scoble is guided through the building by Graham Weston, chairman, Dirk Elmendorf, Chief Technology Evangelist and Founder and Lew Moorman, SVP of Strategy and Corporate Development.

Danny McPherson from Arbor Networks announced today on their “Security to the Core” blog their  (Active Threat Level Analysis System) portal.  Over the last 18 months, Arbor has been working with their customers who have deployed the Arbor Peakflow SP platform to gather global statistics around DDoS traffic and other security threads.

So far 68 providers are participating in the program, and according to Arbor, more then 70% of the Internet is protected by the Peakflow platform. The data is collected on nearly 1300 routers and the peak traffic levels are up to 1.5 Tbps.

Some trends have become visible over the past 18 months:

• IRC servers are still the most comment target
• the most common attacks are TCP SYN flood based, with ICMP floods at a close second

According to Arbor, DDoS traffic has accounted for an average of 1.3% of all traffic, with peaks up to 5%!

Teh Atlas portal includes the following items at the moment:

• Global Threat Map: Real-time visibility into globally propagating threats
• Threat Briefs: Summarizing the most significant security events that have taken place over the past 24 hours
• Top Threat Sources: Multi-dimensional visualization of originating attack activity
• Threat Index: Summarizing Internet malicious activity by offering detailed threat ratings
• Top Internet Attacks: 24-hour snapshot of the most prevalent exploits being used to launch attacks globally
• Vulnerability Risk Index: Determines the most dangerous vulnerabilities being exploited on the Internet today

Since 17:53 UTC today, there is again direct connectivity between both networks, and as a consequence customers on both networks can reach each others again.

Below is the view of the connectivity of one of the Cogent prefixes (38.0.0.0/8) as it was seen again today. (Click on the image for a larger version)

We did some test using the Cogent Looking Glass, and we can see that connectivity between both networks has been restored at multiple locations in the US and Europe.

Traceroute from Washington towards www.teliasonera.se:

 1 fa0-8.na01.b005944-0.dca01.atlas.cogentco.com (66.250.56.189) 4 msec 4 msec 0 msec
  2 gi3-9.3507.core01.dca01.atlas.cogentco.com (66.28.67.225) 4 msec 4 msec 4 msec
  3 te3-1.ccr02.dca01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.3.158) 4 msec 4 msec 0 msec
  4 vl3493.mpd01.dca02.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.7.230) 4 msec
    te4-1.mpd01.dca02.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.2.182) 0 msec 0 msec
  5 vl3494.mpd01.iad01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.5.42) 0 msec
    vl3497.mpd01.iad01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.5.66) 0 msec 4 msec
  6 ash-bb1-geth7-3-3-0.telia.net (213.248.88.41) 4 msec 4 msec 4 msec
  7 nyk-bb2-link.telia.net (80.91.250.18) 8 msec
    nyk-bb2-pos0-3-0.telia.net (213.248.80.137) 12 msec
    nyk-bb1-link.telia.net (213.248.83.21) 8 msec

Hop 6 is the first hop on the TeliaSonera network and the hostanme identifies this as Ashburn/US.

Traceroute from Los Angeles:

  1 gi10-0.224.core01.lax01.atlas.cogentco.com (66.250.4.5) 0 msec 4 msec 4 msec
  2 te3-1.mpd01.lax01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.2.102) 0 msec 0 msec 4 msec
  3 vl3492.mpd01.lax05.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.3.10) 0 msec
    vl3493.mpd01.lax05.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.6.230) 0 msec 0 msec
  4 gi0-0-0.core01.lax05.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.6.185) 4 msec 4 msec 0 msec
  5 las-bb1-link.telia.net (213.248.72.177) 4 msec 4 msec 4 msec
  6 nyk-bb1-link.telia.net (80.91.254.18) 76 msec 72 msec 72 msec
  7 kbn-bb1-link.telia.net (80.91.249.25) 168 msec 172 msec 168 msec
  8 s-bb1-link.telia.net (213.248.65.141) 172 msec 176 msec 176 msec
  9 s-b4-link.telia.net (80.91.251.21) 176 msec 176 msec 176 msec

Hop 5 shows us the second interconnect in the US, located in LA.

Traceroute from Amsterdam:

 1 vl3.mpd01.ams03.atlas.cogentco.com (130.117.16.125) 0 msec 0 msec 4 msec
  2 gi2-0-0.core01.ams03.atlas.cogentco.com (130.117.0.33) 0 msec 0 msec 4 msec
  3 po1-0.core01.lon01.atlas.cogentco.com (130.117.1.225) 68 msec 220 msec 228 msec
  4 ldn-b4-link.telia.net (213.248.70.237) 8 msec 8 msec 12 msec
  5 ldn-bb1-link.telia.net (80.91.251.18) 8 msec
    ldn-bb1-link.telia.net (80.91.250.234) 8 msec 24 msec
  6 hbg-bb1-link.telia.net (80.91.250.220) 24 msec
    hbg-bb2-link.telia.net (80.91.254.218) 24 msec 24 msec

Hop 4 is the first router on the TeliaSonera network. This time located in London/UK.

Traceroute tests from the other Cogent routers in Europe all go through London, even from Stockholm, indicating that we London is the only interconnect between the two networks in Europe.

Why is that? Are there really only very few networks out there who buy solely from one of the two and as such have alternate path to the affected networks?

Earl Zmijewski from Renesys posted an update on the Renesys Blog where he analyses further the situation. Interesting read.

Click on the image to view the animation in a new window.

You can also download the PowerPoint presentation here.

There is still no official comment from either side regarding this topic. Whenever Cogent had been de-peered in the past (Level3, OpenTransit,etc…) it didn’t take Cogent very long to release information blaming the other party. Well that isn’t the case this time.

Interestingly enough, the overall opinion out there seems to be that Cogent is the bad guy this time. This is mainly based upon the original post on Gigaom.

I was never really convinced that this is the case, since it doesn’t really make any sense for Cogent to de-peer Telia. If they would, it would clearly indicate a rather radical change of direction in Cogent’s peering policy, which was rather open over the past years (at least compared to other networks of the same size).

It is very interesting to see that Cogent only very recently extended their network footprint into the Nordics (Finland, Sweden, Norway), and as such straight into the heart of Telia-land! Until then, Cogent wasn’t a major competitor for Telia in these countries.

Now, we obviously don’t have any facts here, but it very suspicious that this peering dispute happens shortly after Cogent enters Telias home-market!

UPDATE: Gigaom has published further information, and although the source isn’t given, the article provides comments from Dave Schaeffer (Founder and CEO of Cogent):

Quote: Getting specific about Telia, Schaffer says that the Nordic carrier is in breach of a contract with his company. The bone of contention is quite arcane. Cogent says that Telia was obligated to install certain peer connections with Cogent at specific locations, but hasn’t done so because it wants to degrade the experience for Cogent customers.

Cogent says that Telia was obligated to install certain peer connections with Cogent at specific locations, but hasn’t done so because it wants to degrade the experience for Cogent customers.

“They are resentful of our expansion in these markets,” he says. Schaffer also says his company remains “willing and anxious for settlement-free peering” and that “Telia needs to meet their contractual obligations.”