Cogent for ISP bandwidth

Jay Ashworth jra at baylink.com
Tue May 15 00:30:35 UTC 2012


----- Original Message -----
> From: "Jason Baugher" <jason at thebaughers.com>

> I've done some searching and haven't been able to find much in the last
> 3 years as to their reliability and suitability as an upstream provider.

Really?  That surprises me; people complain about Cogent on here, roughly,
weekly.  :-)

> For a regional ISP looking for GigE ports in the Chicago/St. Louis area,
> is Cogent a reasonable solution? Our gut feeling is that they don't
> stack up against a Level3 or Sprint, but they are being very aggressive
> with pricing to try and get our business.

The implication of everyone's "in a BGP mix" responses, in case you don't
get it (and I suspect you might not) is that you don't want Cogent to be
your *only* upstream provider.

If you're going to resell the bandwidth as an ISP, best practice says you
should have at least 2 upstreams.  3 or more is better,

Cogent has had a bad habit the last 5 or 10 years of getting into pissing
matches with other carriers about peering, and just cutting them off
(or being cut off)... which of course means that if they're your only 
connection to the Internet, then your customers simply can't reach sites 
connected to those providers.

So, in short: no matter how agressive they are, they're not the carrier
to have when you're having only one.

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                  Baylink                       jra at baylink.com
Designer                     The Things I Think                       RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates     http://baylink.pitas.com         2000 Land Rover DII
St Petersburg FL USA      http://photo.imageinc.us             +1 727 647 1274




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