  The IceCube collaboration has discovered a new, cosmic component of
high-energy neutrinos. Although neutrino oscillations suggest that the cosmic
neutrino spectrum is almost the same for every neutrino flavor, the attempts to
reconstruct it, based on different analyses, lead to different energy spectra
below 100 TeV. In this work, we propose a phenomenological model that, assuming
collisions between cosmic rays and hadrons as the production mechanism of
high-energy neutrinos, yields quantitative expectations for each neutrino
flavor. We discuss the detectability of the prompt component of the atmospheric
neutrino spectrum, pointing out the most relevant dataset, which has to be
muon-neutrino depleted and to cover the energy region 10-100 TeV. We argue that
the prompt component can cause the spectral difference between the
High-Energy-Starting-Event (HESE) and the through-going muon datasets. Finally,
we point out the need for adopting a consistent model for the interpretation of
the data, stressing that a separate treatment of the different datasets is, by
converse, a suboptimal procedure.
