On Nov 3, 2008, at 10:01 AM, Daniel Senie wrote:
At 06:54 PM 11/2/2008, Daniel Roesen wrote:
On Sun, Nov 02, 2008 at 04:40:20PM -0500, Randy Epstein wrote:
> Problem resolved?
https://www.sprint.net/cogent.php
Reading this accounting of Sprint's side of the story reveals
something that's not too surprising about Sprint. They've got
serious accounting problems.
The trial of peering they talk about was for three months in 2007,
ending in September 2007. They claim to have billed Cogent at the
end of it, though knowing Sprint's billing (having had them fail to
send me bills, then hit me with late fees) they probably can't prove
that. But this is a YEAR later.
They let an account linger for a year without collecting or
terminating the services provided. That's their own damned fault.
This indicates poor management of Accounts Receivable. That's your
problem, Sprint, deal with it.
Also in this document is a complaint that Cogent failed to
disconnect. Excuse me? This was a trial PEERING agreement. That
implies one or a series of point-to-point connections. That implies
EITHER party can disconnect the circuits (in reality, the physical
circuit doesn't even matter, just shut down the BGP session(s)).
So Sprint failed to manage Accounts Receivable and left this
"temporary" circuit in place too long. Some bean counter noticed
this a year later. Way to go Sprint.
As I've noted previously, Sprint hurt its own customers by the
action taken. It's my guess they restored the circuit to avoid
further damage to themselves that resulted from their actions.
You have an interesting set of assumptions. Is there any reason you
did not give Sprint the benefit of the doubt? For instance, is it not
possible that Sprint knew this and was trying "for a year" to fix the
problem without taking such drastic steps? Because they did not want
to hurt their own customers?
It's interesting to see a biased, "blame Cogent first" mentality in
so many postings on NANOG. Maybe they deserve it, maybe not. But
after reading the traffic here, after living through the
consequences of the Cogent/L3 depeering, and after reading what
Sprint said on their page, my read on this is that Sprint's
accounting department might need some house cleaning.
And I thought just the opposite.
Having a clear contract with clear terms, giving Cogent plenty of
notice, taking the links down slowly over time to ensure Cogent knew
what was happening, etc., etc. That was very up-front, above-board,
and more than polite on Sprint's part, IMHO.
Compare Sprint's actions & attitude to Cogent's sub-12-hour notice
when they de-peered Telia.
Yeah, Cogent is definitely the more professional company....
--
TTFN,
patrick
