Level 3, Cogent Partners Shocked By Internet Disruption

"It is important to keep in mind that traffic received by Level 3 in a peering relationship must be moved across Level 3's network at considerable expense," Choksi said in the statement. "Simply put, this means that, without paying, Cogent was using far more of Level 3's network, far more of the time, than the reverse. Following our review, we decided that it was unfair for us to be subsidizing Cogent's business."

Level 3 last Friday said it would again shut down the Cogent peer connection if the company fails to make certain changes by 6:00 a.m. EST on Nov. 9. Choksi’s statement didn’t specify the necessary changes, and a Level 3 spokeswoman declined to comment further.

Meanwhile, Cogent has begun offering Level 3 customers one year of free Internet access if they leave Level 3. The wording of the Cogent offer, delivered in a statement from Cogent CEO Dave Schaeffer, was less-than-gracious to Level 3. "Cogent feels that Internet users deserve better treatment while this situation is ironed out. That is why Cogent is appealing directly to Level 3 single-homed customers and offering them one year of free, dedicated Internet access to provide them with access to the full Internet, not just the Level 3 portion of it," Schaeffer said in the statement.

The increase in Cogent traffic that Level 3 complained about stems in part from Cogent’s acquisitions of other Internet backbones and their peering traffic, said Jeff Henriksen, director of marketing communications at Washington-based Cogent. He said Cogent thought Level 3’s warnings leading up to last week' outage were requests to update the peering contracts of networks Cogent had acquired.

"We thought it was more a maintenance issue, clearing up old contracts--house cleaning," Henriksen said. Cogent has 425 other peer networks, he said.

Tom Snyder, COO of Xantrion, an Oakland, Calif.-based consultant and MSP, said Level 3’s action caused as many as 45,000,000 IP addresses to become unreachable. Xantrion customers running SonicWall firewalls, however, were spared any long-term effects of the “de-peering” thanks to failover Internet features in those products, he added.

Xantrion was able to remotely reprogram the SonicWall firewalls in customer networks to take alternative paths through the Internet, quickly restoring full access, Snyder said. Like New Global’s Bradley, Snyder thinks awareness of such Internet failover techniques is limited.

"Companies servicing the small- to midsize-business market are, I think, just becoming aware of these new tools for failover and redundancy,” Snyder said. “I base this on the fact that most of our new customers are transfers from other service providers in our market, and none of them have had failover before we put it in. Also, none of the engineers we have hired have been aware of this technology. So awareness is one issue." The cost of Internet failover has dropped significantly in the last three years, he added.