Honest Cogent opinions without rhetoric.

Wed Mar 8 16:43:30 UTC 2006

At 08:57 AM 3/8/2006, Patrick W. Gilmore wrote:

>On Mar 8, 2006, at 1:56 AM, alex at pilosoft.com wrote:
>
>>At certain cities, your experience will be worse - Cogent doesn't have
>>peers with big boys in every city they are at - so you'll have more
>>chance
>>of being backhauled to sfo/iad than if you bought from $bigger- carrier.
>
>It's not just cities, it's entire countries.  Try being on a DSL line
>in France and getting to a Cogent web server in France.

How is this different from being a Comcast cable modem customer in 
New England, trying to connect to a web server also located in New 
England. Packets route through NYC if the user is lucky, but more 
often Chicago or Washington DC. In terms of mileage and latency, just 
how different is that from the DSL case in France you cite?

Reality is "broadband" providers in some areas have sucky, or 
non-existant, peering. Do you blame that on the backhaul network, or 
on the "broadband" provider?

>>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.)
>
>Etc., etc.
>
>Cogent claims they are good for the Internet as a whole because they
>keep prices down.  That might be true for people who are only
>interested in price.  Or for people who are interested in partial
>transit for cheap (same thing, really).  But if you plan to single- 
>home or otherwise _depend_ on Cogent, I would be hesitant.

As others have said, cogent is OK as part of a transit mix, but not 
necessarily as a single homed provider. That said, they're far from 
the only network (including the biggest names/networks) that I would 
say that about. Everyone's networks have meltdowns at different 
times. Everybody seems to get into pissing matches.

>--
>TTFN,
>patrick
>
>P.S. To be clear, Cogent has lots of peers and works very well for
>most destinations most of the time.  However, is not necessarily what
>some people need from their provider.