Level 3 Communications and Cogent Communications, two major Internet companies cut off the connections between them because the arrangement wasn’t financially viable anymore.

Level 3 considered that the arrangement with Cogent was no longer profitable so they decided to interrupt the connection if the ex-partner won’t pay for the traffic exchange. The main motivation of Level 3 was that their network is much more bigger than Cogent’s and asked them to find other solutions because they have no benefits from the current arrangement. In the other hand, Cogent claims that they have a network at least as big as Level 3′s.

Until they settle the dispute, some people are affected by this separation because they might not be able to get access on some websites that are hosted on the other company’s network. For example, William Steele, a senior network engineer for Syncro Services complained, “There are some people I can’t send an e-mail to,” Steele said. “At home, I have Road Runner as an ISP, and wasn’t even able to remotely connect in order to manage our servers.”

Cogent CEO Dave Schaeffer declared that his company wants to resolve this manner. Our goal is to have this problem go away, whether through Level 3 reconsidering or their customers coming to us,” Schaeffer said.
But Level 3 said that it is not going to reconsider under any circumstances.