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

[McTim]

On Sun, Apr 20, 2008 at 8:46 PM,  <nancyp at yorku.ca> wrote:
> 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.

Definitely not.  I agree with Jon, if we start stretching the
definition of NN to be whatever we want it to be, we will never have
NN, as the goalposts will forever move.

This is a business issue between providers and their customers.  If
you can't rely on your upstream, then get a new one (or get a second).
  As you know from our offlist mails, YORK U has AS802 and a /16 of
address space, with these resources, you can multihome easily.  Oh
wait, you ARE multihomed, to AS549 (ONET AS ONet Backbone) and AS174
(Cogent). AS549 is connected to Cogent and to AS26677 (ORION ASN
Ontario Research and Innovation Optical Network ORION), which in turn
is connected to AS852 (ASN TELUS Communications Inc), who are
connected to 124 peers, AS1299 (Telia) among them.  Traffic should
have gone to Telia via those links.  From what I can see from route
reflectors, AS549 only sent and received routes from AS802 for about
an hour on 2008-04-08 during the last two months.

Scroll down to the bottom of
http://www.renesys.com/blog/2008/03/he_said_she_said_cogent_vs_tel.shtml
for an opinion on this.

If peering is a NN issue, then so is the fact that I pay 2x what folk
in the EU pay for only a very small fraction of the bandwidth they
get, or the fact that some folk can get FiOS, while others are "stuck'
with twisted copper pair/wireless/$CONNECTION_TYPE.


Cogent never informed York
>  University that it was severing their relationship with a good part of Europe's
>  internet by de-peering with Telia.

Why would they, really?

The fact is that AS802 gets more European routes from Tiscali (via
Cogent) than from Telia, many more.

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.

I don't see why this is germaine.

-- 
Cheers,

McTim
$ whois -h whois.afrinic.net mctim
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