cogent - Sales practices

Mailman List Mirror (Read Only)
1

So we just got an email from cogent, we have told them time and time again to stop calling and stop emailing. We tell them are good on bandwidth and we don’t need any of their services… They then sent us a e-mail stating that they saw us coming though one of their customers networks from us, and figured we would want to buy direct instead of going though one of their customers. Yes COGENT stated this; well at least one of their sales reps. Sounds underhanded, shady, and unethical to me. Just figured I would post about it; see if I am making a mountain out of a mole hill :blush:

Here is the e-mail:

"Hey (redacted) ,

Maybe there is a misunderstanding. (ISP’s name removed) is a cogent customer who we provide upstream to.

My initial inquiry was to see if it makes sense for Link Technologies to be utilizing our network instead of through (ISP’s name removed). That way we could be a direct network for you.

Would that be at all something that interests you?

Eric Gogerty | Global Account Manager | AS 174

Cogent Communications | Minneapolis, MN (United States Of America)| www.cogentco.com

Contact: 612-217-5506| email: egogerty@cogentco.com

The Internet, Unleashed!"

LTI-Full_175px

Dennis Burgess

Mikrotik : Trainer, Network Associate, Routing Engineer, Wireless Engineer, Traffic Control Engineer, Inter-Networking Engineer, Security Engineer, Enterprise Wireless Engineer

Hurricane Electric: IPv6 Sage Level

Cambium: ePMP

Author of "Learn RouterOS- Second Edition”

Link Technologies, Inc – Mikrotik & WISP Support Services

Office: 314-735-0270 Website: http://www.linktechs.net

Create Wireless Coverage’s with www.towercoverage.com

Need MikroTik Cloud Management: https://cloud.linktechs.net

How did we do today?

Gold StarGreen LightYellow LightRed Light

2

Cogent getting involved in absolutely obnoxious and shady sales tactics that they'll seemingly never address or do anything about? Why I never

3

So we just got an email from cogent, we have told them time and time again to stop calling and stop emailing. We tell them are good on bandwidth and we don’t need any of their services… They then sent us a e-mail stating that they saw us coming though one of their customers networks from us, and figured we would want to buy direct instead of going though one of their customers. Yes COGENT stated this; well at least one of their sales reps. Sounds underhanded, shady, and unethical to me. Just figured I would post about it; see if I am making a mountain out of a mole hill :blush:

Here is the e-mail:

"Hey (redacted) ,

Maybe there is a misunderstanding. (ISP’s name removed) is a cogent customer who we provide upstream to.

My initial inquiry was to see if it makes sense for Link Technologies to be utilizing our network instead of through (ISP’s name removed). That way we could be a direct network for you.

Would that be at all something that interests you?

Eric Gogerty | Global Account Manager | AS 174

Cogent Communications | Minneapolis, MN (United States Of America)| www.cogentco.com

Contact: 612-217-5506| email: egogerty@cogentco.com

The Internet, Unleashed!"

LTI-Full_175px

Dennis Burgess

Mikrotik : Trainer, Network Associate, Routing Engineer, Wireless Engineer, Traffic Control Engineer, Inter-Networking Engineer, Security Engineer, Enterprise Wireless Engineer

Hurricane Electric: IPv6 Sage Level

Cambium: ePMP

Author of "Learn RouterOS- Second Edition”

Link Technologies, Inc – Mikrotik & WISP Support Services

Office: 314-735-0270 Website: http://www.linktechs.net

Create Wireless Coverage’s with www.towercoverage.com

Need MikroTik Cloud Management: https://cloud.linktechs.net

How did we do today?

Gold StarGreen LightYellow LightRed Light

4

It’s not just you. I saw a social media post with the exact format posted by someone who got a similar email.

5

He has to do that to show there is activity on the account otherwise another rep can challenge it.

Best regards
August Yang

6

Today while negotiating with Cogent for connectivity in the WOW 226 Datacenter I sent a copy of the original email and told them I will NEVER use Cogent for my customers due to this kind of activity.

Imagine if everyone else follows suit.

When they go low - make sure others know you are unwilling to use them.

– When they do call my cell and I know it is them I answer with

Thank you for calling the Mental Health Hotline. If you are dislexic please dial 696969696969 :wink:

7

I think that was Dennis :slight_smile:

8

Two current experiences . . .
I still do work with an ILEC that gets requests for waves to Cogent. Cogent has a data center in the market but won’t allow the ILEC to build in. So Cogent burns ports in another data center where Cogent pays for space and power. Cogent reps says no one gets anything for free.

Had a recent event with Meta for the small market ixp deployment. The use, just use, Cogent for connectivity /fill.

And a plan . . . Order up 10g Global peer exchange ports from them. They are free. Maybe if they sell enough of those they will have to spend more of their dollars.

9

I have a morbid curiosity about what the CRM database looks like inside Cogent, for the stale/cold leads that get passed on to a new junior sales rep every six months.

The amount of peoples’ names/email addresses/phone numbers in there must be stupendous.

All of this can probably serve as a useful training tool for smaller/mid sized ISPs with their own outbound sales staff on how not to treat the potential customers.

10

Funny because I’ve been avoiding calls with my new rep for weeks and was partially admiring the commitment to make contact with me . Hehe

11

What is the benchmark? What are we trying to do? Where does CCOI fail
and some competitor succeeds? Purely from tenQ POV, CCOI seems to be
doing fine and improving. Many shops that we could consider
competitors have been run to the ground or been sold off to avoid
losing more.

I fear that what they are doing objectively works from a business POV,
and nanog is not representative of the addressable market, if
anything, it may be a net-win to get rid of us, as we may be more
expensive to support than mean.