Battle Of The Bandwidth Titans
We often take the internet for granted, not necesarilly aware of the struggles that go on behind the scenes, such as that between U.S. based Cogent and Swedish TaliaSonera. Presently these two large bandwidth providers are fighting over peering issues:
“According to Cogent CEO David Schaeffer, TeliaSonera peered data selectively and refused to upgrade bandwidth at some of the companies’ peering connections, causing traffic to take long, winding routes around the internet and saturating peered connections’ pipes.“
Schaeffer went on to imply that the loss of routing to their customers (and eventually consumers down the road) was not a result of their spat with TeliaSonera, but likely had more to do with TeliaSonera failing to pay their business partners.
The net result is that international traffic is currently not operating at peak efficiency, and thus there is traffic spilling over to other networks and slowing even some domestic traffic down.
