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Cogent CEO Dave Schaeffer told Light Reading Wednesday that the real reason Level 3 clipped the peering connection last week is because it believes Cogent is pricing its Internet service at “below cost,” making it hard for Level 3 to compete.

"In mid-September I got a phone call from a very senior person at Level 3, and in that telephone call they said, 'We’re going to cut you off if you guys don’t either pay us or reconsider your pricing strategy and raise prices,' ” Schaeffer says.

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Level 3’s O’Hara strongly denies Schaeffer’s claim. “I have heard this allegation before and we take it very seriously, and to my knowledge nobody from this organization has made that request of Cogent, and that’s as far as I’m going to go with that,” O’Hara told Light Reading Thursday.

O’Hara says after Cogent didn’t respond to several notifications that de-peering was imminent, his company assumed Cogent had made a comparable peering arrangement elsewhere.

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