Cogent service

Fri Sep 20 03:54:08 UTC 2002

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