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

  • From: Daniel Senie
  • Date: Wed Mar 08 11:50:22 2006 
At 08:57 AM 3/8/2006, Patrick W. Gilmore wrote:


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.
How is this different from being a Comcast cable modem customer in New England, trying to connect to a web server also located in New England. Packets route through NYC if the user is lucky, but more often Chicago or Washington DC. In terms of mileage and latency, just how different is that from the DSL case in France you cite?

Reality is "broadband" providers in some areas have sucky, or non-existant, peering. Do you blame that on the backhaul network, or on the "broadband" provider?


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.
As others have said, cogent is OK as part of a transit mix, but not necessarily as a single homed provider. That said, they're far from the only network (including the biggest names/networks) that I would say that about. Everyone's networks have meltdowns at different times. Everybody seems to get into pissing matches.


--
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.