Mike Tancsa wrote:

They are also one of the biggest providers... Proportionally speaking, if they had the same percentage of failures as a provider 10% of their size, it would appear Cogent is "worse" as there would be more reports. Also, in my experience, I find Cogent pretty good about admitting to outages, even if we didnt notice it. Some providers on the other hand do everything possible to hide any issues... Sorry - I don't buy the "They're big, so they have more problems". I've never seen the frequency of network issues with any Tier 1 (for want of a better nomenclature) that I have seen with Cogent. Admitting a problem does not help when their facilities do not have enough capacity to route around the failure of one of their POPs. Cogent's pricing in Canada is not that far off from a number of other providers I could choose from so to say "you get what you pay for" misses a bit of detail. They are not the cheapest, but in that price range, I like the service they offer and have found them a relatively reliable provider. There are other "premiere" / "Tier 1" providers that I found gave worse service, had billing that would drive my AP people crazy and were far more difficult to deal with from a trouble ticket perspective. Cogent have been 50% cheaper than most other providers I have used, as far as raw IP services go. They have also had exponentially more network issues than other transit providers. Usually it's stuff that makes life difficult, such as a failure at a POP that causes congestion somewhere else - I'd be okay if their local POP died and took out my BGP session, but alas that only happened once when they blew some breakers one day.

David

I have been very pleased with our service from Cogent. Regards Marshall On Jun 3, 2008, at 1:06 PM, randal k wrote:

We've had Cogent for going on three years now, and they've been nothing but exceptional across the board. Our sales guy is excellent - attentive but not overbearing. We've had one easily-resolved billing issue, and their team got us squared away on one call. Their tech support has been phenomenal for us - we've only had to call a few times (all BGP emergencies on our end, not theirs), but every time it was single-call, single-person response; having an empowered network guy answer the phone is extremely refreshing. Our multiple email tickets have always been immediately responded to and closed within 24 hours. Also, the bang for the buck is out of this world.

Our only complaint, and I do mean /only/ complaint is that they are ~25% of our traffic and not more (we peer w/ TWTelecom & Level3 as well). Dear Cogent, please peer more/better and we'll give you more money.

As someone else said, if you have three peers, Cogent had better be one of them or you're missing out.

Cheers, Randal

On Tue, Jun 3, 2008 at 10:06 AM, TS Glassey <tglassey@earthlink.net> wrote:

...

So at one time Cogent was one of the lowest performing bandwidth providers. Anyone have any responses to their current operations?

regards, Todd Glassey CISM CIFI Chief Scientist/Founder - Certichron Inc TGlassey@Wireless-Time.COM 650-796-8178

Don't forget AOL in the list of companies they have de-peered (or have been de-peered from) in the past, as this was big at the time. I personally think that arguably the Level 3 spat had the biggest impact (at least in the US, I know that was a bad day here). This all comes back to Cogent's views of the size and traffic patterns on their own network. They often think of themselves as a Tier 1 network and are perceived to act that way, even though most of the companies they "peer" with are actually transit providers. As far as I know, all of their "spats" have been billing disputes where they were trying to force other carriers into settlement-free peering arrangements, even though the carriers saw the traffic patterns on the Cogent links as pretty heavily swayed to one side. It seems that there are lots of little T2/T3 ISPs that have Cogent as primary or balanced transit, but very little content takes its primary path over Cogent's network. This is why Cogent gets a bad name with many people in the industry. Some call it aggressive business tactics and some just call it wrong, you choose for yourself. I would not ever want them as my primary (and certainly not my choice for single-homed connections), but not because of performance but instead due to fear of being cut off or "segmented" the next time they try to make a stand. It is a good idea to have them included in a long list not only due to price, but also to ensure you can reach their customers if/when the next spat happens. Just my 2 cents, -Scott -----Original Message----- From: Greg VILLAIN [mailto:nanog@grrrrreg.net] Sent: Tuesday, June 03, 2008 2:55 PM To: nanog list Subject: Re: Querstions about COGENT and their services... On Jun 3, 2008, at 6:06 PM, TS Glassey wrote:

So at one time Cogent was one of the lowest performing bandwidth providers. Anyone have any responses to their current operations?

regards, Todd Glassey CISM CIFI Chief Scientist/Founder - Certichron Inc TGlassey@Wireless-Time.COM 650-796-8178

Couple remarks on their reputation in europe, I've never had Cogent transit, so this requires further investigation. They're the cheapest (cost-wise, I wouldn't venture to say technically- wise) in Europe, that's a fact. They often get into peering clashes against major actors, they've recently been in that situation with Telia, in the past with France's incumbent (Orange), Level 3 has also depeered them in the past, this is due to them being brokers and is inherent to their pricing policy - it certainly will keep happening to them in the future. The above point is from my perspective a show-stopper, but a good strategy I've very often heard from some of their customers is to use them to forward traffic towards exotic locations, where QoS is not an issue, or where revenue is not critical. Their IP core is supposedly a patch-work resulting from their numerous past acquisitions (PSINet, Lambdanet to name a few), which can explain the many outages they have. Still, the sales people in Europe are really kind, comprehensive and caring people, which makes it a little better, I suppose :) Hope this helped. Greg VILLAIN Independant internet architect No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG. Version: 8.0.100 / Virus Database: 269.24.6/1480 - Release Date: 6/3/2008 7:00 AM