----- Original Message -----
From: "Jason Baugher" <jason@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@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