North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Honest Cogent opinions without rhetoric.

  • From: Patrick W. Gilmore
  • Date: Wed Mar 08 08:59:04 2006 
On Mar 8, 2006, at 1:56 AM, [email protected] wrote:
At certain cities, your experience will be worse - Cogent doesn't have
peers with big boys in every city they are at - so you'll have more chance
of being backhauled to sfo/iad than if you bought from $bigger- carrier.
It's not just cities, it's entire countries. Try being on a DSL line in France and getting to a Cogent web server in France.


With regard to depeerings: they are a fact of life on the internet - and
as a service provider, you should always have multiple transits, for this
and other reasons. Yes, you obviously will have more risk of being caught
in a depeering fight if you are buying from $low-price-leader-du-jour,
because these are the ones more likely to be depeered by $big-boys for
being "too-competitive". ;)
De-peering is a fact of life, but Cogent takes something that other people consider a nuisance and turn it into a Real Problem. No other network has been "de-peered" for multiple days multiple times in the last several years. No other network has refused to provide some type of help (e.g. credits) for customers who were affected by the depeering. (Hell, Cogent offered more help to L3's customers than they did to their own - although many people say they did not honor those offers.)

Etc., etc.

Cogent claims they are good for the Internet as a whole because they keep prices down. That might be true for people who are only interested in price. Or for people who are interested in partial transit for cheap (same thing, really). But if you plan to single- home or otherwise _depend_ on Cogent, I would be hesitant.

--
TTFN,
patrick

P.S. To be clear, Cogent has lots of peers and works very well for most destinations most of the time. However, is not necessarily what some people need from their provider.