The emails on the Outages list reminded me to ask this question...
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. 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.
Thanks,
Jason
In my experience Cogent is fine when used in a BGP mix. When we used them, our service was quite reliable. Routing was funky at times, but we never had packet loss.
--John
I have very little issues with Cogent in the Chicago/Indiana/St. Louis
areas. They are peered much better than they were a few years ago.
We have 1 client at Cermack purchasing Cogent bandwidth through a third
party at well under $1 a meg.
Justin
Jason,
I agree with John. You can't use them as your only provider, but you
wouldn't do that with *any* provider. I will add that they answer the
phone quickly, and the person who answers usually has a clue, has access
to the routers, and can be helpful. It's one of the benefits that they
really only sell one product. Honestly, I think their support is better
than most and the deliver what they say or better.
In the past the had a A peer / B peer setup that was a little funky, but
I think they are getting rid of that as they upgrade hardware throughout
their network.
We do also use Level3 (and others). As long as they come in to your
facility on different fiber or otherwise meet you physical diversity
requirements, you should be pretty happy. Add low commits to other
providers for more diversity as needed.
Good luck,
Mike
Cogent is really better suited as a tertiary provider.
Not a bad option, but you don't want to lose redundancy when they get
involved in their peering dispute or de-peering du jour.
Drive Slow,
Paul Wall
I use Cogent as one of our upstreams at work, and I'll basically reiterate what others have said -- overall, I'd have no problems recommending them. Their routing can sometimes be a little weird (though this is MUCH better now than it was a couple of years ago), so I wouldn't necessarily use them as my main provider for latency-sensitive applications, but this isn't normally a problem with 'general' traffic. The A peer/B peer stuff they used to do was definitely weird, but they migrated us away from that configuration a few months ago (peering with them out of TorIX). Presumably they're doing that across the rest of their network. Their support has been fantastic in my experience..
I'd have to say they're probably the least painful provider I've dealt with overall (unlike some providers *cough*Telus*cough* who I've been waiting 7 weeks for to set up a freaking BGP session...). I'd have no problems picking Cogent as a provider, though of course as one of many providers for redundancy (which would be no different than any other single provider).
- Pete
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. 
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,
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
Michael J McCafferty wrote:
Jason,
I agree with John. You can't use them as your only provider, but you
wouldn't do that with *any* provider. I will add that they answer the
phone quickly, and the person who answers usually has a clue, has access
to the routers, and can be helpful. It's one of the benefits that they
really only sell one product. Honestly, I think their support is better
than most and the deliver what they say or better.In the past the had a A peer / B peer setup that was a little funky, but
I think they are getting rid of that as they upgrade hardware throughout
their network.
I like the separate peers. Its a nice concept in theory and gives you the flexibility to easily integrate it into an RR setup.
I wouldnt mind more providers offering it as an option without having to be educated as to how it works.
Joe
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.
No way they stack up against level3 or any of the other 4 big tier 1s but if you throw them in a blend with level3 there shouldn't be any issue and I wouldn't pay more the .75 cents a meg for a gig
Thanks,
Ameen Pishdadi
I often tell folks, Cogent is the 'Heidi Fleiss' of the industry ...... pretty much everyone of the major carriers / providers deal with them.. but no one wants to admit it.
I don't think there is any carrier out there that could be considered 'Premium' in terms of quality of service (yeah their are a lot of folks who are Premium based on what they charge)...
One can only hedge one's bet for a quality connection by having multiple providers (you can mix and match) or go with some one like Internap or Tinet (folks who are taking traffic across multiple providers at their POP).
Of course your mileage may vary.... as long as you have alternate connectivity, it makes dealing with issues more palatable, whether it is Cogent or Level3...
Regards.
Faisal Imtiaz
Snappy Internet& Telecom
Has nothing to do with whether or not they deal with all the major carriers , they are a budget provider , always have , always will be. Aside from that what matters the most is eye ball user connectivity and level3 , AT&T, Verizon significantly have more eye balls connected directly to there network then cogent , we have cogent and level3 and 5 other providers on our Chicago network , with out any traffic engineering almost every thing will come in or go out level3, we use traffic optimizing equipment to automate our commit levels and also do performance based routing adjustments , I literally have to put a gun to its head to get a descent amount of traffic out to cogent , you may say it's a matter of opinion but statistics don't lie, even Telia out performs cogent according to stats , not just cause they have a massive eye ball network in Europe.
Ask yourself , who are the majority customers of cogent? Not end user ISPs , hosting companies aka content providers, and when there selling bandwidth cheaper then it costs to peer then there going to keep there costs to the minimum ... Cheaper is cheaper , the saying is true , you get what you pay for.
A Kia and Ferrari can both get me from point a to point b, but the Ferrari is capable of getting me there way quicker, and yes I'm going to pay a premium for it but if I'm going from NYC to San Fran I'd definitely feel safer in the Ferrari reliability wise and get there a hell of a lot quicker...
But like I said and the other 10 replies nothing wrong with cogent in a nice blend of 3 or more other providers ...
Thanks,
Ameen Pishdadi
So when you play "What's the common factor?", you get... ? <grin>
We decided not to use Cogent as one of the suppliers for a recent PoP
deployment because of these sorts of games -- it's not that we'd get caught
in them (we've got three providers), but we just don't want to reward that
sort of behaviour with our money.
- Matt
We use Cogent as one our upstreams and have had nothing but stability and excellent support over the years. But as other said, you really need multiple upstreams and cannot rely just on one whether it is Cogent or any other provider.
Mark
I'm surprised the IPv6 component hasn't been brought up, yet -- Cogent's
IPv6 prefix coverage is smaller than most. So having even two providers is
insufficient -- you really need at least three, so that if any one of the
three goes down you're not IPv6-isolated.
Frank
Let me say it differently.
Take a look at thier AS174 peering relationship, (e.g using bgp.he.net), you can see that they (Cogent) are very well connected (directly) with all of the major networks. (this is what I meant by, they deal with all of the major carriers).
Your experience with traffic is very different from what we have seen, while I can understand that, it can be due to many factors.
Based on AS Peering relationships, it would appear that Major / Most of the end user ISP's have them in their mix. I my opinion the Hosting providers use Cogent as a way to off load incoming traffic from the more expensive carriers. Cogent performance is very decent if the traffic is all on-net ... they typically have issues when traffic is crossing their network, i.e. coming in and going out via their peers to other networks.
While the Kia and Ferrari example is cute, but when put into the context of 'Traffic' or 'Speed limit', then neither has the advantage. One might look good driving in a Ferrari.. but I digress.... packets are agnostic of what brand of router they are traveling thru or whose network they are transiting.
We are in agreement, that Cogent makes a good backup secondary or tertiary in a mix of Ip transit. However having said that it is valuable to check the bgp peering relationships of the different providers that you have, to make sure that you are choosing providers based on actual diversity rather than a perceived one.
Regards.
Faisal Imtiaz
Snappy Internet& Telecom
I appreciate the reference to bgp.he.net, I had not used that tool before.
We've worked with Sprint for years, and they have always been excellent for reliability and support. We recently picked up Level3, and so far they have been very good as well. It's a small thing, maybe, but I like that both Sprint and Level3 have nice online tools for change requests, trouble tickets, etc... We've been a Lightcore/CenturyLink customer for years as well, also very reliable. They don't have the slick online tools, but I can usually get a live person in their NOC.
Cogent is being very aggressive with their pricing, and if it weren't for the fact that we are geographically challenged and have to pay for transport to get to them, we might have already taken them up on it.
Thanks for all the input from everyone.
Jason
5/15/2012 8:00 AM, Faisal Imtiaz wrote:
That's $7.50 per 1000mbps. Sign me up!
Nicolai
Keep in mind http://bgp.he.net is not always accurate. It is a great
start but even after years of pointing it out there are adjacencies
missing and oddly some listed as direct where no relationship even
exists.
+1 here. Some would say if you are of a certain size, you almost NEED to
have a Cogent connection amongst others for when they have their spats.
If you are missing the history here, check out this link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogent_Communications#Peering
-Scott