dan, all, On Wed, Mar 08, 2006 at 09:35:15AM -0500, Daniel Golding wrote:
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.
we referred to this in the presentation about the depeering ( http://nanog.org/mtg-0510/underwood.html ), but just to update it: i see that that 258 ASes are relying on cogent for all or substantially all (>95%) of their connectivity to the Internet. many of these may be multi-homed and just never using their backup connection, but still, that's a lot of people trusting cogent for their day-in day-out connectivity. i'm not a cogent cheerleader or basher (or customer). just here to provide concrete, objective info. also, in response to a couple of questions that i've taken in private about the rankings: the good part about these network rankings that we've been doing is that they are objective, repeatable and difficult to falsify. this is in contrast to traffic stats, that are notoriously unreliable (read: false, lies) and difficult to confirm. there are certainly a couple of potential optimizations available in the future, though. we think that the current customer-base rankings may under-represent consumer broadband networks (such as comcast) , in part because these networks tend to generate substantially more traffic for each amount of prefix-space than do many other kinds of networks. we're thinking about ways to model that difference. the other reason we think that they may under-represent these networks is because many of them still use lots of different ASes--BellSouth is a good example here. although we could (and probably will) fix that with some AS clustering algorithms, the ASes in question could (and probably will) fix that by consolidating ASes, too. :-) the current rankings are accurate with respect to routing and are a reasonable approximation of some of the other metrics that people wish could be directly measured (traffic, market power, etc.). [people should also be aware that we're producing 5 different rankings that measure different kinds of things, so just focusing on the customer-base ranking may be a mistake]. t. -- _____________________________________________________________________ todd underwood +1 603 643 9300 x101 renesys corporation chief of operations & security todd@renesys.com http://www.renesys.com/blog