Backbone-News

Sprint-Nextel announced on Sunday that “they initiated a temporary reconnection to the Cogent network while longer term alternate and permanent access options are explored.”

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.

As we wrote earlier, Cogent and Sprint-Nextel are in the midst of a peering dispute. Slowly more details are appearing which gives us a better view on what happened and ended in the disconnection. Both companies entered a peering agreement in November 2006. According to the information posted by The Register, Sprint confirms that this was purely a trial agreement, and Cogent does actually not fulfill all of the requirements defined in that agreement, in particular in regards of traffic levels exchanged between the two networks.
Matthew Sullivan (Sprint) told The Register: “Cogent failed to satisfy the peering criteria that was laid out in the agreement and refused to pay Sprint to stay connected to our network”.  Cogent does not agree to the financial compensations defined in the agreement, and as a consequence, after a long period of discussions and giving Cogent advance notice of the plan, Sprint-Nextel deactivated the connections and end the agreement.

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.