[152746] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Cogent for ISP bandwidth
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jason Baugher)
Mon May 14 22:28:22 2012
Date: Mon, 14 May 2012 21:27:57 -0500
From: Jason Baugher <jason@thebaughers.com>
To: nanog@nanog.org
In-Reply-To: <16295469.4200.1337041835820.JavaMail.root@benjamin.baylink.com>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
On 5/14/2012 7:30 PM, Jay Ashworth wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Jason Baugher"<jason@thebaughers.com>
>> I've done some searching and haven't been able to find much in the last
>> 3 years as to their reliability and suitability as an upstream provider.
> Really? That surprises me; people complain about Cogent on here, roughly,
> weekly. :-)
Sorry, been on this list for quite some time, and I even went back to
the archives. I don't see much there that is specific to Cogent doing a
bad job. If I go back a few years, I find stuff about Cogent-Telia,
Cogent-GBX, and even Cogent-HE IPv6 peering.
>> For a regional ISP looking for GigE ports in the Chicago/St. Louis area,
>> is Cogent a reasonable solution? Our gut feeling is that they don't
>> stack up against a Level3 or Sprint, but they are being very aggressive
>> with pricing to try and get our business.
> The implication of everyone's "in a BGP mix" responses, in case you don't
> get it (and I suspect you might not) is that you don't want Cogent to be
> your *only* upstream provider.
>
> If you're going to resell the bandwidth as an ISP, best practice says you
> should have at least 2 upstreams. 3 or more is better,
This would be a 3rd or possibly a 4th upstream.
> Cogent has had a bad habit the last 5 or 10 years of getting into pissing
> matches with other carriers about peering, and just cutting them off
> (or being cut off)... which of course means that if they're your only
> connection to the Internet, then your customers simply can't reach sites
> connected to those providers.
>
> So, in short: no matter how agressive they are, they're not the carrier
> to have when you're having only one.
>
> Cheers,
> -- jra
