Level 3 takes a digger

[Matt]

http://www.betanews.com/article/Leve...ght/1129915712

Level 3 Communications experienced what it called "widespread network instability" early Friday, causing problems for numerous ISPs and hosts that depend on Level 3 to serve traffic. According to posts on the NANOG mailing list, the issue may have centered on faulty maintenance in one of the Internet backbone's service centers.
The outage began at roughly 2AM ET, and lasted for several hours. Some reported problems with their connections up to seven hours after the initial failure. Level 3, which is one of the largest providers of Internet service in the country, offers dial-up and broadband at wholesale prices to its customers. Level 3 was most recently in the news for its spat with competitor Cogent over network traffic.

[Matt]

It is getting pretty absurd.

Looks like congress is going to finally step in on this one. For the Layman, what is essentially happening is two slightly regulated bodies that are responsible for a VERY large percentage of how you get from point "A" to "point "B" on the Internet, are bickering with each other on how they want to do business.

What that means to you, as a web user is because two heads of staff at these companies cannot "get along" they decided to "agree to disagree" and effectively not route each others traffic to their destination. Effectively bringing many web surfers to no where, or if they got there at all, very slowly.

Web Hosts (point B) and ISP (point A) have been getting the brunt of the attack from their customers. When the problem really lies in-between point A and B. I will call it point 1.5 for now

In any case congress is finally getting involved. Can you imagine if Bellsouth decided that Qwest and Sprint were not people they wanted to deal with? And because of that, we will not allow phone calls to complete? There would be lawsuits to the sky.

I am glad we are getting a little bit of legislation on the Internet for these sort of issues as every one suffers.

Hopefully Internet regulation does not continue down the path to the point of how our general freedoms as US citizens have declined so sharply over the last few years.