Honest Cogent opinions without rhetoric.

Wed Mar 8 13:24:34 UTC 2006

At 01:56 AM 3/8/2006, alex at pilosoft.com wrote:

>On Wed, 8 Mar 2006, Martin Hannigan wrote:
>
> > >         I am looking for user experiences for people who have
> > > purchased
> > >transit from cogent in the 300Mbps or up range as far as performance,
> > >stability, and any other measurable metric of quality you can come up
> > >with.
> > >
> > >         We have heard a lot of negatives about them, about their
> > >pricing model, about their network, about de-peering with Level 3, etc.
> > >What we really need is actual information.
>Much of the negatives is from jaded competitors who don't want to fairly
>compete. Other than that, the answer is 'it depends'.
>
>[ SNIP ]

>(from Marty)
> >  From a global perspective[1], the top 12 (I stopped at Cogent since you
> > are asking about them) service providers whose customers and peering
> > partners reach the largest number of networks are listed below. You can
> > make some fairly interesting assumptions on your own:
><snip>
>
>This gotta be the most meaningless metric ever. What does "reach"
>mean?  More ASNs seen behind given network? What does it tell, precisely?
>There are ASNs which have significant chunks of intarweb (say, AS1668)
>behind them, while AS721 is not likely to matter in a grand scheme of
>things, even though all .mil installations are behind it.
>
>Note that many Cogent customers, while using Cogent for outbound, prefer
>not to announce any routes to Cogent for political reasons (or prepend or
>depref their routes). So, that metric won't be exactly helpful.

721 is included because it's on the list.

In some markets Cogent is a leader and they cause price pressure. There
are metro areas that Cogent is number two verses big tier 1. You ought to
be getting good deals from the tier1 in that market as you manage your
capacity.

-M<

--
Martin Hannigan                                (c) 617-388-2663
Renesys Corporation                            (w) 617-395-8574
Member of Technical Staff                      Network Operations
                                                hannigan at renesys.com  