Cogent Communications, a global Internet service provider for enterprises, has sued Deutsche Telekom in the U.S. federal court in Virginia for breach of contract – for congesting its Internet connections with Cogent.
The company in a statement issued on Tuesday said that Deutsche Telekom, a telecom operator head-quartered in Germany, has interfered with the free flow of Internet traffic between the customers of Cogent and Deutsche Telekom by refusing to increase the capacity of the interconnection ports that allow the exchange of traffic.
Robert Beury, chief legal officer of Cogent, said: “Deutsche Telekom is using its market power as the dominant provider of residential Internet service in Germany in an attempt to extract a toll from companies in the U.S. that provide Internet services that Deutsche Telekom’s customers want to use.”
The development harms smaller U.S. companies that cannot afford to locate Internet servers in Europe where they can directly connect to Deutsche Telekom and avoid the congestion.
The attached graphs show the flow of traffic between the two networks at interconnection points in Frankfurt, Germany and Ashburn, Virginia. Points where the blue line approaches the top of the chart indicate times when traffic congestion is occurring and packets of data are being dropped. Normally, capacity would be increased so that traffic rarely exceeds 70 percent of capacity (i.e. 14 Gbps in Frankfurt and 7 Gbps in Ashburn, VA).
Cogent’s lawsuit seeks an order from the court forcing Deutsche Telekom to increase its capacity at interconnection points to alleviate the congestion, as well as damages.
Cogent Communications, ranked as one of the top five Internet backbone networks in the world, specializes in providing high speed Internet access, Ethernet transport and colocation services in 190 markets globally.
