Vic Fraenckel wrote:

> I was downloading some Open Source stuff from a site in France the other day which was excruciatingly slow. I was told on the user forum that since I was hitting the French network from the US that I was contending with a deliberate slowdown because of some turf wars among major providers on the continent and it was a money thing. Possible?

Very possible, even likely.  :-)

Backbone providers charge each other at interconnect points, unless they 
make prior arrangements to mutually exclude each other from charges and 
interconnect to each other directly (called "peering arrangements").

Especially in International connections, rate-limits are typically 
imposed both directions, and surprising to some -- sometimes it's 
because the cheapest way to go from point-A to point-B isn't under-sea 
fiber, it's satellite -- complete with extra latency and slower speeds.

Google searching for "Cogent vs. Level 3" will turn up one of the more 
recent and very public flaps had between two medium-sized providers. 
Level 3 cut off Cogent customers for a time because they didn't feel the 
peering deal they had with Cogent was a fair trade.

In the end, both carriers "lost" out on this one and Level 3 and Cogent 
agreed to play nicely in the sandbox, because other larger carriers 
offered "free move to us" deals with customers of either "side" to 
switch to "a real backbone provider".  Customers won -- and whatever 
issues L3 and Cogent have will have to be worked out without affecting 
their clients, probably over an executive luncheon or ten.

(Joke: Maybe they had to put the peering back up so they could have a 
videoconference about it.  LOL.)

This type of thing happens on the backbones all the time.  Usually by 
mistake, but this recent example was a business decision by Level 3.

The "Internets" joke poking fun at President Bush for his misuse of the 
word "Internet" really isn't that uncommon these days... some people can 
see some things, others can't.  Doom and gloom types think this 
fragmentation of the backbones will get worse, most of us think 
customers will just leave providers that have lower levels of 
interconnectivity.

And of course then there's countries with censorship issues... China 
filters "all" Internet connectivity, supposedly.  The "Internet" as seen 
from a Chinese computer isn't the same "Internet" I see from a 
residential DSL provider here in the States.

And now that VoIP is VERY prevalent in the data backbones, my old telco 
joke can come back out of hiding:

"He who dies with the most erlangs wins!"  :-)

Nate
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