Major Impacts from Cogent-Sprint Peering Flap

Who's affected by the peering dispute between Cogent and Sprint? Lots of businesses, universities and government agencies, according to Renesys, which tracks Internet routing. In a business dispute between the two companies, Sprint has severed the network connections between them. That means any organizations that use only Cogent or only Sprint for their Internet access will be unable to see any sites on the other network. The dispute also leaves customers of WV Fiber unable to see Cogent's network (more on this in a moment).

"Over 200 downstream autonomous system customers of each organization cannot reach the networks in the other," writes Renesys' Todd Underwood. "This is ugly and will remain so." Todd's post provides a thorough explanation of how the Cogent and Sprint networks are affected by the dispute. Here's Renesys' data on who's affected:

The peering dispute also affects customers of WV Fiber, company president Randy Epstein said ina  post on the North American Network Operators Group (NANOG) mailing list.

"WV Fiber (AS19151) is currently partitioned from Cogent since
AS19151 only contracts with Sprint for transit and is settlement-free with
the rest of its peers," Epstein wrote. " As previously reported, late last year, Cogent
depeered AS19151 for unknown reasons.  Up until yesterday, this wasn't much
of a problem.  Now unfortunately, the two networks (AS19151 and AS174) are
partitioned.  Any single homed WV Fiber customer and any single homed Cogent
customer can not reach each other.  WV Fiber hosts over 7 million eyeballs
and many networks."