Spring has sprung and the waft of drivel from a new season Cogent salesdroid filled my telephone earpiece today.
I've never liked the Cogent way of business and my understanding of their IP transit is that it falls into the "cheap for a reason" category.
However, perhaps someone would care to elaborate (either on or off-list) what the deal is with the requirement to sign NDAs with Cogent before they'll discuss things like why they still charge for BGP, or indeed any other technical or pricing matters. Seems weird ?!?
I recently cancelled a circuit with them that began life as transit and converted to P2P, where the BGP fee never disappeared, and had been fighting them on it for eight months. Now that the circuit is gone they've switched to completely ignore mode. So, not likely I'll use them again. I did the initial conversion because I got tired of customers with Google IPv6 issues and fortunately had a P2P need it could satisfy for a bit of time.
Same reason your employer doesn't want employees telling each other their salary. Not every similarly situated customer pays the same for the same service.
The ironic thing is they demand NDAs and yet they don't comply with requests to stop unsolicited marketing despite written historical promises that they would.
Having fought that issue[0], I’d like to point out that employees voluntarily
sharing salary data is federally protected speech in the US, and cannot
be waived through an employment contract:
"Under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA or the Act), employees have the right to communicate with other employees at their workplace about their wages. Wages are a vital term and condition of employment, and discussions of wages are often preliminary to organizing or other actions for mutual aid or protection. "
…“policies that specifically prohibit the discussion of wages are unlawful.”
I understand the parallelism you were aiming for, but
given how many people labour under the mistaken
notion that US companies can forbid you from talking
about your compensation, I felt it prudent to point out
that’s actually not a terribly good comparison. ^_^;
I have a morbid curiosity what their CRM system looks like, and how many entries are in it and what their internal notes/work flow looks like.
This opinion is formed from the external perspective of being a person who is a very cold sales lead and yet continues to be occasionally called by a new sales person every 4 to 6 months.
While I cannot speak to their marketing practices in general, Cogent has taken specific positive steps to avoid inadvertant use of the ARIN Whois data for solicitation (taking place after our January 2020 engagement with them on this topic), and in August of 2020 they regained direct access to the publicly available ARIN Whois data. We do occasionally get reports of potential misuse, but it is definitely far fewer than before (and many track back to contact information provided to them via other means.)
As always, if you believe that your ARIN Whois contact information has been inappropriately used for solicitation by any organization, you can report it to us at compliance@arin.net for review and potential investigation.
Thanks!
/John
John Curran
President and CEO
American Registry for Internet Numbers