The Telia-Cogent Spat Could Ruin the Web For Many
Updated: Swedish telecom operator Telia and U.S.-based connectivity provider Cogent Communications have gotten into an ugly spat and have stopped interconnecting, according to some of my sources in the telecom business. What this essentially means is that Telia’s DSL customers could have trouble seeing Cogent-connected web services. Telia, now part of TeliaSonera is one of the largest networks in Europe.
The bickering could be because one of the two parties feel they need to be paid for the traffic they are sending. I am looking into this and have emails out to all my sources in the bandwidth business, and will update accordingly. (If you have any information, drop me a line.)
Cogent had previously gotten into a slugfest with Level 3 Communications. Cogent’s stance towards Telia is hypocritical. Here is a press release they issued back in 2005 when complaining about Level3. As a reader points out, Cogent has been involved in such spats with other carriers as well. OpenTransit (France Telecom), Teleglobe, ATDN are some of those who have had Cogent issues.
This is a letter Telia sent to its customers:
Dear Customer,
We would like to give you the following information:
Cogent has decided not to exchange traffic directly with TeliaSonera’s AS 1299 or indirectly with AS 1299 through a third-party provider. As a result, Cogent has partitioned the Internet and disrupted the flow of traffic between Cogent and TeliaSonera customers.
While this has a negative impact on some users of the Internet, this effect is the result of Cogent’s decision and is unfortunately beyond TeliaSonera’s control. Until Cogent rectifies this situation, TeliaSonera customers experiencing any difficulty reaching Cogent’s network can continue to purchase IP Transit from TeliaSonera along with another Tier 1 provider. This will fix the immediate problem and ensure optimal connectivity going forward.
We sincerely apologise for the inconvenience caused…
If you have further concerns, please address your commercial contact at TeliaSonera
Updated with inputs from our readers. Thanks guys
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Om,
The spat is over settlement free peering.
Before, Cogent and Telia had a “comp” (ie. no $$$) connection between them.
Today, Cogent decided that they didn’t like this arrangement. Instead, they figure that if Telia wants to talk to Cogent, it should pay Cogent (or pay another network that has a “comp” connection to Cogent).
Very hypocritical in light of how much Cogent bitched at Level(3) not that long ago for doing the /EXACT/ same thing that Cogent is now doing to Telia.
http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/10-07-2005/0004163871&EDATE
Telia should issue a “Standing offer to Cogent” Press Release.
Telia can use a paid connection to reach Cogent.
Cogent can use a paid connection to reach Telia.
Neither company is.
Peering is politics.
This is not going to ‘Ruin the Web’, although it will cause a little bit of tangle as the order of the jungle is balanced. It’s an unscheduled Internet backbone pissing match. And last months victim is todays bully.
Welcome to the Internet.
Thank you for this information. Not even Telia would say anything about this issue when I contacted them yesterday, they just said “we are having some routingproblems that hopefully will be solved during the night”.
Lets hope for a fast resolution.
Video streaming will flood all peering.
The strangest thing is that in continental europe Cogent offers 100mbps connects in poped buildings bij telia over these telia fiber lines … that would suggest that they have an extensive partnership
Cogent de-peered Telia because Cogent like to have an European Peering with Telia, so now Cogent believe Telia will say yes to that, but seems to be that the US guys do not understand Swedish mentality, in my opinion Cogent should better ask his upstream Provider Verio to help reaching Telia in future.
This is a regular occurrence with Cogent: their previous “slugfest” with Level(3) is mentioned but not their ‘disagreements’ with OpenTransit (France Telecom), Teleglobe, ATDN etc. Any experienced network operator should know by now that buying transit exclusively from Cogent is a bad gamble.
TeliaSonera must stop spreading corruption and bribery all over the world!
Yay, “great”. My website doesn’t work in Finland because I’m Sonera’s customer. I was just trying to update my site and now I can’t even connect to my host. I also host pile of sites which they too don’t work.
So it isn’t just Sweden and Denmark, it’s also Finland. :(
Actually it’s not just Telia’s problem, becouse finnish operator Sonera joined Telia few years ago forming group called TeliaSonera, so problem exists in Finland too.
Cogent Peering Strategy
“Cogent is one of the five largest networks in the world in terms of the number of peers with which it works. Cogent executes an open peering strategy as part of providing its robust 100 Mbps and 1,000 Mbps Internet access services. The strategy is a combination of two separate, yet inter-related initiatives: extensive private peering and numerous public peering agreements.”
Sorry Cogent, now you are depeering the largest network in Europe(TeliaSonera). Hope that your Customers will show you the bill.
Cogent=Shit