From: Charles Gucker

...

Depends on if you like to do traffic engineering; Cogent's BGP community support, consisting of a whole three things you can set (two if you only have a single connection to them), makes that rather difficult.

Umm, where did you get that mis-information from? The last communitiy guide I've seen from them has quite a bit more than two ;p

For a quick reference: http://www.onesc.net/communities/as174/as174.pdf

charles

I was meaning more along the lines of types of things you can control. You have limited route export control, and even more limited path prepend control; that's two. :-) Or if you're multi-homed to them, you can set local pref too. Alternatively, I'll just use Level 3 as an example because we have peering with both of them as well as three others. Level 3 lets us control local pref, prepend to specific remote AS numbers (incredibly useful and something everyone should insist on from their providers), prepend to EU peers, all the same export controls and then some, announce to specific AS, do not announce to specific AS. On the incoming side, where Cogent has tags for all of four whole groups (NA non-customer, NA customer, EU non-customer, EU customer), Level 3 has tags for the same plus peering points, cities, countries, regions, MEDs ignored, MEDs accepted, internal, etc.. We like having our connectivity to Cogent because we like to have fast delivery of our customers' content to Cogent's customers, not because of the price. On more than one occasion we have had issues where the only solution to a problem of our customers accessing us coming through a remote peer of Cogent's who had a problem, and a preference for the Cogent route, was to turn down our session with them until that remote peer resolved their issue; there's no other way to make them prefer a different route, including with the help, or lack thereof, of Cogent's NOC. David