[governance] IGF-Is Peering a Net Neutrality Issue?

[nancyp at yorku.ca]

Is Peering a Net Neutrality Issue?

A York University professor was sitting at his desk at work in March 2008 trying
to reach an internet website located somewhere in Europe. It was important to
his research so when he repeatedly could not reach the site he contacted his IT
department at the University. They were mystified why this would be the case.
The Professor went home after work and found that he could reach the website
from home consistently, for many days and was not ever able to reach the
website from the University campus network.

York’s transit bandwidth supplier is Cogent which had severed a peering
relationship with a bandwidth provider in Europe called Telia. Telia was the
bandwidth network provider for the website that the Professor was trying to
reach. Thus the Professor could not reach the website over the University’s
network. However at home, the Professor purchased bandwidth from Rogers (and
its upstream providers) who did not sever their peering relationship with
Telia. Cogent did not proactively inform the University of the issue and the
loss of connectivity. The University had to open a trouble ‘ticket’ in order to
receive an explanation from Cogent regarding the reason for the failure.

 Is this a net neutrality issue? Definitely. Cogent never informed York
University that it was severing their relationship with a good part of Europe’s
internet by de-peering with Telia. In fact the SLA (Service Level Agreement)
between the University and Cogent is (typically) a very slender document which
defines bandwidth, uptime and price solely. It is usually the case that one
receives more documentation when purchasing a motorhome for example, than when
one purchases large bandwidth.

Cogent is one of the five largest networks in the world in terms of the number
of peers with which it works and more than 95% of Cogent's traffic goes across
private peering connections. The peering dispute between Cogent and Telia left
many networks in the U.S. and Europe unable to connect with one another.
Renesys, which tracks Internet routing, had some additional details on the
impact of the dispute. Renesys said many networks were unable to simply route
around the impasse, perhaps because one party (probably Cogent) had taken steps
to block alternate traffic paths. Their analysis found that 2,383 Telia network
prefixes could not reach Cogent at all, while 1,573 Cogent prefixes were
completely cut off from Telia. The impact was most widely felt in Europe, but
more than 1,900 U.S. network segments were affected as well. What was
surprising was that networks in the US were actually cut off from each another,
given that a largely US provider was de-peering with a largely Swedish one. The
list of impacted networks in North America was long; it included a wide range
of commercial, educational and government clients such as Blue Cross and Blue
Shield of Delaware, Kansas State University and Reuters America. On the Telia
side, the networks included the Swedish Defense Data Agency, the Finnish State
Computer Center, and broadband customers in St. Petersburg. Renesys noted that
Flag and SingTel discontinued peering shortly after the Cogent-Telia peering
was restored in late March, but were allowing customers to find one another via
alternate routes.
 (Miller, R. 2008. Cogent Telia Dispute Widely Felt. IDG TechNetwork, Mar 18,
2008.Retrieved online from:
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/Mar/18/cogent-telia_peering_dispute_widely_felt.html)

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