On Tue, 12 Dec 2000, William Stephenson wrote:

I have heard nothing but positive things about Cogent. Give Barry Morris a call. I used to work with him at Nortel. Good guy.

i didnt think they had a live network with real paying customers. it is easy to have a great network without any customers :)

Ah, how quick we are to jump. Cogent's push lately has been businesses with offices in MTU's across the united states. Idea: Get rid of your expensive, low bandwidth frame relay PVC's all over hell and back, and get 100 megs with Cogent. You save mad cash. A company that can turn up a new office and have 100 megs bandwidth to all the other offices for file sharing, e-mail, remote backups, etc, .. well -- this changes the backoffice-workings of the brick-and-mortar. Cogent isn't offering 100 meg transit to just anyone for this price point -- their ideal customer is a company that pays $1500 a month for a T1 to xyz.com .. and their other ideal customer is a company with offices in various MTU's that Cogent is in - and getting rid of the inter-office PVC's and running the network over Cogent's fiber. Sounds like a good deal to me. We signed up a couple weeks ago to light up a little over a half dozen offices. The biggest advantage is not the transit (we do under 5 meg avg), but the office-to-office communications. Turn up VoIP and there's an added communications savings. <shrug> Previously, VIIS Network Operations Center said:

The Cogent contract I've seen is a month-to-month. My suspicion would be that they get a critical mass of customers, then start increasing the monthly recurring, ala L3.

Grant Kirkwood

On 12/12/00 9:54 PM, Daniel L. Golding wrote:

...

Indications are that Cogent is an MTU (multi tenant unit) provider, AKA a bLEC, like Cypress or ARC. That's how they will get the necessary economies of scale. Even so, $10/mb is no way to ever brake even. Seems to be an exercise in transitioning money from VC to equipment and fiber vendors as quickly as possible...I was impressed by the folks they had at NANOG, though - seemed like very nice folks. Nice folks with a kind of whacked business model, though.

- Dan Golding

On Tue, 12 Dec 2000, Bill Petrisko wrote:

...

Has anyone heard anything about Cogent Communications (www.cogentco.com) or done business with them?

Their product is a dedicated 100Mbps of transit for $1000/month.

Quick rundown: Metropolitan OC-48 rings, with no more than (24) 100Mbit customers on each. Nationwide OC-192 rings between the MAN rings with extensive private peering.

Any feedback would be appreciated.

thanks bill -- William J. Petrisko (WP5) Network Engineering bill@axient.com Axient Communications

-- i am jamie at arpa dot com .. and this is my .sig. All I want is a kind word, a warm bed and unlimited power. <BasharTeg> Linux is like drugs. They seem fun at the time, but someday you have to live with the consequences of your actions.

Not that i am even remotely defending Cogent but how does Yipes plan to offer Internet at Gigabit speeds? Or is that more marketing fud.... Quoted from Yipes web page: "Yipes is Faster. Yipes brings you the Internet at fiber-optic speeds, up to 1 Gbps" -dave -dave Matt Clauson wrote:

DISCLAIMER: Even though I'm posting this from my personal account, I work for Yipes Communications, who is a competitor of Cogent. Please take anything I say with the appropriate amounts of salt. I promise I'll try not to advertise too much. The comments I write below are mine and mine alone, however, and do not reflect on Yipes Communications, or my DSL provider, or anyone else but me. ;)

In fact, to be fair, about the only thing I think I can, or should, say is that there are other providers out there than Cogent. There was a Slashdot thread, for those who care about such things:

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/12/05/1317235&mode=nested

Working for a competitor, I shouldn't say much else at this point, lest it appear I be attempting to spread FUD. If you have any questions about what we provide, please send them to me offlist and I'll try to get them answered.

--mec

Matt Clauson wrote:

On Thu, Dec 14, 2000 at 10:13:41AM -0700, Dave Cooper wrote:

...

Not that i am even remotely defending Cogent but how does Yipes plan to offer Internet at Gigabit speeds? Or is that more marketing fud....

Quoted from Yipes web page:

"Yipes is Faster. Yipes brings you the Internet at fiber-optic speeds, up to 1 Gbps"

I'm not the best at explaining the technology... But the short version is that we're deploying our fiber as metro area fiber "rings".... Using Gig-E fiber, not SONET. To bring down the data speed to the customer rate, we rate-limit at the ethernet interface facing the customer (we drop a smart switch in each building where we have a customer lit). Depending on the customer's requirements (speed, latency, equipment) is what kind of switch we deploy -- we can provision copper 10(0)baseT, or gig-e fiber.

--mec

That's true. There is new working group setup in IETF (802.17) which has been chartered to work exactly on this (Resilient Packet Rings). There is similar standarization efforts going in IETF (IPoPTR) dealing with layer 3 issues. Vinay Bannai Luminous Networks