Honest Cogent opinions without rhetoric.

Wed Mar 8 15:54:48 UTC 2006

At 09:35 AM 3/8/2006, Daniel Golding wrote:

>On 3/8/06 8:57 AM, "Patrick W. Gilmore" <patrick at ianai.net> wrote:
>
> >
> > On Mar 8, 2006, at 1:56 AM, alex at pilosoft.com wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> >> 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.)
> >
>One way to look at this is that you are getting a very low price per mbps
>with Cogent. Therefore, when Cogent's CEO decides its in his best interest
>to partition for a week over a depeering situation, their customer's role is
>to suck it up. You get what you pay for, and in this case, that means
>mediocre to average transit with periodic partitioning. Frankly, for the
>price, that's pretty darn good.
>
>If your choice is between Cogent and some other provider, you are making a
>mistake. Cogent (and other low cost transit providers) can be part of a
>balanced stable of transit providers. Folks who single-home to Cogent
>deserve whatever Darwin delivers to them.
>
>Do what Peter Cohen said and run an RFP. Every competent network engineer
>should be able to write an Internet transit RFP.

More of my point was geared toward what seemed like choosing a network
mostly on an economic argument when there are more sophisticated ways
to accomplish the same thing - and potentially get what you want, but
with better access. For example:

EXAMPLE METRO (A real metro, names changed to protect the innocent)

1Network-Sierra
2Network-Lima
3Network-Taco41
4<https://demo.renesys.com/mi/browse.do?net=174>Cogent Communications

If this is what a metro area market looks like in terms of
leadership, there is clear pressure put on the metro area pricing by
Cogent. There is no reason to not exploit this fact. The response by
the others may be to at least get to a range where you are more comfortable
and able to get top tier transit vs. crap shooting.

There are other factors, assume that they've been addressed and it's down
to $ and performance. Yes, Cogent may be bigger than they "look", which is
another argument to use in pricing negotiations for transit, IMHO.

This won't fit everyone, but it should fit transit buyers ok.

-M<

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