As reported earlier, at the end of last week Cogent and Telia got disconnected from each other. The peering relationship between both networks has been terminated, and the fact that both Cogent and Telia customers can no longer reach each others shows that at least one of the two parties is preventing the normal flow of traffic through alternative paths (i.e. their upstream connections). Neither Cogent, nor Telia is a so-called Tier1 provider, and each one of them is buying Transit from at least one other network. As mentionned on the Renesys blog, this was actually the case during the first 12 hours after the peering connections got disconnected. During that period of time, traffic rerouted Verizon.
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.”
