On 5/18/24 06:04, Jon Lewis wrote:
Cogent has been trying to establish themselves as a "tier 1" carrier in markets outside their home turf, and Asia is one of the markets in which the established operators are doing their best to keep Cogent out.
Back when I was helping to run a global anycast CDN, Cogent was one of our transits [in US and EU POPs]. I identified a bunch of sub-optimal service to networks in Asia who were silly/cheap enough to buy transit from Cogent. Since none of the established players would peer in-market with Cogent, and since we didn't have Cogent transit in any of our Asian POPs (why would we?), anycast request traffic from those Cogent customers would cross the Pacific and land in California rather than hit a nearby POP with NTT, Tata, Singtel, etc. transits.
I suspect Cogent has either reached what they consider to be customer critical mass in Asia, or is tired of their Asian customers complaining about latency (since traffic to any other in-market non-Cogent connected network routes via the US or EU) and has decided it's time to play peering chicken to force Tata to peer with them in Asia. Why shouldn't they? The only reason Tata, NTT, etc. won't peer with Cogent in-market is because they don't want Cogent to be able to compete with them in their home market.
They have a similar problem in Africa with the major African IP Transit providers; and they are far less deployed in Africa than they are in Asia. Mark.