[105006] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Querstions about COGENT and their services...
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (David Coulson)
Tue Jun 3 14:12:33 2008
Date: Tue, 03 Jun 2008 14:12:19 -0400
From: David Coulson <david@davidcoulson.net>
To: Mike Tancsa <mike@sentex.net>
In-Reply-To: <200806031732.m53HWIVh029511@lava.sentex.ca>
Cc: nanog@merit.edu, TS Glassey <tglassey@certichron.com>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces@nanog.org
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
