Cogent input

Thu Jun 11 14:17:10 UTC 2009

I hate when these questions get asked, because as the saying goes..."a
person happy with a service will only tell one other person, but a
person unhappy with a service with tell ten other people".  So I think a
lot of times you'll get skewed responses...but with that said, we've
been using Cogent now for a year and no complaints at all. Had some
minor downtime back in April due to a hardware failure, but Cogent
responded extremely quickly, scheduled an emergency maintainance and had
us  running rather quickly. Face it, hardware problems happen so I can't
blame Cogent on the failure. The few times I've dealt with their tech
support group I found 99% of them very knowledgeable and I know that
when we initially turned on the link they went the extra mile to resolve
some initial problems during the weekend time frame. 

My 2 cents and with any provider mileage will vary,
Bret

On Thu, 2009-06-11 at 15:01 +0100, Andrew Mulholland wrote:

> At $JOB-1 we used Cogent.
> 
> Lots of horror stories had been heard about them.
> 
> We didn't have such problems.
> 
> Had nx1Gig from them.
> 
> On the few occasions where we had some slight issues, I was happy to
> be able to get through to some one useful on the phone quickly, and
> not play pass the parcel with call centre operatives.
> 
> 
> and at least in the quantities we were buying they were significantly
> better value than others, which was the primary reason we went with
> them.
> 
> 
> 
> andrew
> 
> 
> 
> On Thu, Jun 11, 2009 at 2:55 PM, Paul Stewart<pstewart at nexicomgroup.net> wrote:
> > Our experience with them was at least one major (longer than an hour)
> > outages PER MONTH and many of those times they were black holing our
> > routes in their network which was the most damaging aspect.  The outages
> > were one thing but when our routes still somehow managed to get
> > advertised in their network (even though our BGP session was down) that
> > really created issues.  I have heard from some nearby folks who still
> > have service that it's gotten better, but we are also in the "regional
> > offering" when it comes to IP Transit and have sold connections to many
> > former Cogent customers who were fed up and left.
> >
> > I have found with Cogent that you will get a LOT of varying opinions on
> > them - there are several other players (at least in our market) that are
> > priced very similar now and have a better history behind them.....
> >
> > The specific de-peering issues never effected us much due to enough
> > diversity in our upstreams and a fair amount of direct/public peering...
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Paul
> >
> >
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Justin Shore [mailto:justin at justinshore.com]
> > Sent: Thursday, June 11, 2009 9:47 AM
> > To: NANOG
> > Subject: Cogent input
> >
> > I'm in search of some information about Cogent, it's past, present and
> > future.  I've heard bits and pieces about Cogent's past over the years
> > but by no means have I actively been keeping up.
> >
> > I'm aware of some (regular?) depeering issues.  The NANOG archives have
> > given me some additional insight into that (recurring?) problem.  The
> > reasoning behind the depeering events is a bit fuzzy though.  I would be
> >
> > interested in people's opinion on whether or not they should be consider
> >
> > for upstream service based on this particular issue.  Are there any
> > reasonable mitigation measures available to Cogent downstreams if
> > (when?) Cogent were to be depeered again?  My understanding is that at
> > least on previous depeering occasion, the depeering partner simply
> > null-routed all prefixes being received via Cogent, creating a blackhole
> >
> > essentially.  I also recall reading that this meant that prefixes being
> > advertised and received by the depeering partner from other peers would
> > still end up in the blackhole.  The only solution I would see to this
> > problem would be to shut down the BGP session with Cogent and rely on a
> > 2nd upstream.  Are there any other possible steps for mitigation in a
> > depeering event?
> >
> > I also know that their bandwidth is extremely cheap.  This of course
> > creates an issue for technical folks when trying to justify other
> > upstream options that cost significantly more but also don't have a
> > damaging history of getting depeered.
> >
> > Does Cogent still have an issue with depeering?  Are there any
> > reasonable mitigation measures or should a downstream customer do any
> > thing in particular to ready themselves for a depeering event?  Does
> > their low cost outweigh the risks?  What are the specific risks?
> >
> > Thanks
> >  Justin
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
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> 