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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Cogent service
It seems the posts werent specific to your location, and you didnt specify if you had any priorities in which (if any) backbones were more important to you. Having been CTO at Netrail and dealing with Cogent lately, you should see zero problems going to most backbones such as uunet. The only negative routing comments Ive heard are complaints about extra hop counts. They are integrating 3 different AS#s so you can expect to see some growth concerns, but that is normal and to be expected. Outside of the extra hops, the people I know on the backbone are very happy. The capacity to most peers is very good, and if you build an on-net network with them you will see very good performance. I think it's hard to complain when you are getting such an amazing price. They are building their backbone by providing very large pipes to customers and then managing the aggregate traffic levels. Balancing of traffic is a concern for peering so they will probably ask what kind of traffic you have. If you have eyeball traffic, Im willing to be you could negotiate an even better deal. As their traffic levels grow they will be an important backbone to peer with, and that gives them more leverage in peering. At the very least, if you are uncomfortable go multihomed. At their pricing I would not be concerned at all to having them as one of my providers. They are also responsive to any routing concerns. The only drawback from the customer perspective has been mentioned. They do not want to be everything to everyone. What that tells me is that what they do, they are going to do very well, and they are process oriented. Anyone that tries to be everything to everyone usually isnt very good at anything. If you are concerned about financials, name someone in better shape. It's simple, multihome, or go into a facility where you can quickly move a cross-connect to another provider (thanks Jay Adelson for burning that idea into my head). Dave At 23:54 -0400 9/19/02, Ralph Doncaster wrote: On 19 Sep 2002, Paul Vixie wrote:> Does anyone have any comments (good or bad) about Cognet as a transit > provider in New York? No. But we (ISC) are using them in San Francisco (at 200 Paul Street) and they've been fine.They seem to have above-normal congestion at their peering points. They are prepending 2x on their Sprint and MFN(AboveNet) transit. I guess this has shifted too much traffic to the peering they acquired through PSI and NetRail. They also have very poor routing for some ASNs like 577 (preferring long peered routes over much shorter transit routes). I was also very surprised to see they prepend on BGP announcements to their own customers. If you're multihomed then it means a bit more work to try to avoid paying for a mostly empty Cogent pipe. If financial stability is a concern for you, then I suggest reading the debt covenants in their SEC filings. On one hand I doubt they'll be able to live up to them by Q2 2003, but then Cisco is their main investor so the consequences may not be that bad if they fail to meet them. -Ralph -- David Diaz [email protected] [Email] [email protected] [Pager] Smotons (Smart Photons) trump dumb photons
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