So at one time Cogent was one of the lowest performing bandwidth providers. Anyone have any responses to their current operations?
regards,
Todd Glassey CISM CIFI
Chief Scientist/Founder - Certichron Inc
TGlassey@Wireless-Time.COM
650-796-8178
There have been a few discussions over the last few months on Cogent - Seems the response is mixed, depending if you're on Cogent or old PSINet facilities. My experience has been that you get what you pay for - They're the cheapest, that's for sure. I've not heard anything about them in the last couple of months, but the last year has been filled with almost monthly service outages or congestion.
David
TS Glassey wrote:
We've been using them for 5 years now with no problems other than a crack in
the fiber which was not their fault and that they fixed within an hour or so.
Used them for 3 years before that, with another company, and had no problems
their either.
The only real issue was the couple of times the peering between L3 and Cogent
was stopped - which was really, IMNTBHO, the fault of both parties. I was
able to route around this when it occurred, so was not a significant issue at
the time.
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They got into a spat with Telia a few months back. Severed those
portions of the Internet that they serve from each other for about a
week, disrupting all customers who depended on them exclusively.
Similar situation with Cogent and Level 3 a couple years ago. I
wouldn't count on it not to happen again.
They're dirt cheap. If you have an ability to control the routing of
your non-interactive traffic (such as email and downloads), Cogent can
save you big bucks. If you have three upstreams and one of them isn't
Cogent, you may be missing a trick.
I don't think I'd pick them as my #1 or #2.
Regards,
Bill Herrin
We've had Cogent for going on three years now, and they've been
nothing but exceptional across the board. Our sales guy is excellent -
attentive but not overbearing. We've had one easily-resolved billing
issue, and their team got us squared away on one call. Their tech
support has been phenomenal for us - we've only had to call a few
times (all BGP emergencies on our end, not theirs), but every time it
was single-call, single-person response; having an empowered network
guy answer the phone is extremely refreshing. Our multiple email
tickets have always been immediately responded to and closed within 24
hours. Also, the bang for the buck is out of this world.
Our only complaint, and I do mean /only/ complaint is that they are
~25% of our traffic and not more (we peer w/ TWTelecom & Level3 as
well). Dear Cogent, please peer more/better and we'll give you more
money.
As someone else said, if you have three peers, Cogent had better be
one of them or you're missing out.
Cheers,
Randal
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...
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.
---Mike
I have been very pleased with our service from Cogent.
Regards
Marshall
Try getting a credit from Cogent on a billing error, it's impossible. Every single credit must be approved by the CEO as told to me by the billing director located in DC.
Their network is oversold and they can't supply what they promise. It's one thing to offer service cheap, it's a whole other to offer cheap service.
Good luck if you choose to use them.
--Matt
Beware their max-prefix limits, they dont appear to reset automatically.
If you want to be able to do any TE with de-aggregation, make sure their prefix limit is high enough.
I have had complaints about their performance to AOL and others.
Joe
TS Glassey wrote:
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
Couple remarks on their reputation in europe, I've never had Cogent transit, so this requires further investigation.
They're the cheapest (cost-wise, I wouldn't venture to say technically-wise) in Europe, that's a fact.
They often get into peering clashes against major actors, they've recently been in that situation with Telia, in the past with France's incumbent (Orange), Level 3 has also depeered them in the past, this is due to them being brokers and is inherent to their pricing policy - it certainly will keep happening to them in the future.
The above point is from my perspective a show-stopper, but a good strategy I've very often heard from some of their customers is to use them to forward traffic towards exotic locations, where QoS is not an issue, or where revenue is not critical.
Their IP core is supposedly a patch-work resulting from their numerous past acquisitions (PSINet, Lambdanet to name a few), which can explain the many outages they have.
Still, the sales people in Europe are really kind, comprehensive and caring people, which makes it a little better, I suppose 
Hope this helped.
Greg VILLAIN
Independant internet architect
Overall Cogent has been okay. We've had a few issues over the last
several months. One specifically bothersome as it cropped up several
times. They basically kept rewriting their CoPP ACLs and kept dropping
my side of the /30 from the allow list. This caused our BGP session to
start flapping. Each time this happened it took several hours to
escalate to someone that understood the problem and could get it fixed.
Not even referencing old tickets would help their first line of Support.
On one call an engineer told me BGP was flapping because my config was
split into "address-family ipv4/ipv6 unicast/multicast" rather than one
big "router bgp" stanza.
We have a session with AT&T, so when Cogent does something stupid, we
aren't off the net...
Other than bidding for a contract in a building they didn't actually
have any resources, then trying to get us to pay for the costs of
building out there after they won....And the sales rep quitting right
after they won the RFP....they've been decent.
/Ryan
Greg VILLAIN wrote:
So at one time Cogent was one of the lowest performing bandwidth
providers. Anyone have any responses to their current operations?regards,
Todd Glassey CISM CIFI
Chief Scientist/Founder - Certichron Inc
TGlassey@Wireless-Time.COM
650-796-8178Couple remarks on their reputation in europe, I've never had Cogent
transit, so this requires further investigation.
They're the cheapest (cost-wise, I wouldn't venture to say
technically-wise) in Europe, that's a fact.
They often get into peering clashes against major actors, they've
recently been in that situation with Telia, in the past with France's
incumbent (Orange), Level 3 has also depeered them in the past, this is
due to them being brokers and is inherent to their pricing policy - it
certainly will keep happening to them in the future.
The above point is from my perspective a show-stopper, but a good
strategy I've very often heard from some of their customers is to use
them to forward traffic towards exotic locations, where QoS is not an
issue, or where revenue is not critical.
Their IP core is supposedly a patch-work resulting from their numerous
past acquisitions (PSINet, Lambdanet to name a few), which can explain
the many outages they have.
Still, the sales people in Europe are really kind, comprehensive and
caring people, which makes it a little better, I suppose
Hope this helped.Greg VILLAIN
Independant internet architect
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1304 W. Springfield email: hardenrm@uiuc.edu
Urbana, IL 61801
University of Illinois - Urbana/Champaign
~ - All your Base -
Don't forget AOL in the list of companies they have de-peered (or
have been de-peered from) in the past, as this was big at the time. I
personally think that arguably the Level 3 spat had the biggest impact (at
least in the US, I know that was a bad day here).
This all comes back to Cogent's views of the size and traffic
patterns on their own network. They often think of themselves as a Tier 1
network and are perceived to act that way, even though most of the
companies they "peer" with are actually transit providers. As far as I
know, all of their "spats" have been billing disputes where they were
trying to force other carriers into settlement-free peering arrangements,
even though the carriers saw the traffic patterns on the Cogent links as
pretty heavily swayed to one side. It seems that there are lots of little
T2/T3 ISPs that have Cogent as primary or balanced transit, but very
little content takes its primary path over Cogent's network.
This is why Cogent gets a bad name with many people in the
industry. Some call it aggressive business tactics and some just call it
wrong, you choose for yourself. I would not ever want them as my primary
(and certainly not my choice for single-homed connections), but not
because of performance but instead due to fear of being cut off or
"segmented" the next time they try to make a stand. It is a good idea to
have them included in a long list not only due to price, but also to
ensure you can reach their customers if/when the next spat happens.
Just my 2 cents,
-Scott
"randal k" <nanog@data102.com> writes:
We've had Cogent for going on three years now, and they've been
nothing but exceptional across the board. Our sales guy is excellent -
attentive but not overbearing.
Must not be Joe Kusa then. He managed to get Cogent onto my "do not
buy from these spamming SOBs" list by adding me to their "send out
marketing updates" list without my permission. Also never misses a
chance to ring me up to "touch base" and "stay in touch". Last time
we talked I told him in no uncertain terms that I didn't want to hear
from him again. He seemed unclear on why what he did was wrong.
Oh well,
---Rob
Todd,
I once had that same question. I bought FastE from Cogent almost a year
ago for out of band management of our production gear. But, I put up a
couple of old Celerons running Smokeping up, pinging the same 37 remote
networks. One server on Cogent, and one on our colo providers
super-wicked-premium-route-science network.
Before I started this experiment, I had a very low opinion of Cogent.
Since then I have been absolutely happy with them. You will note that if
you look at the same graphs between on the two, the
super-jam-route-science network is only a very slight bit faster and in
some cases it is not.
Cogent support is surprisingly good. A person who can resolve you issue
is the person who answers the phone. You are not transferred 9 times to
get the the right person. There is no eternal hold.
I can't answer any questions regarding BGP with them as we are not
doing BGP with them yet. This is scheduled, however. Ask me again in a
few months. If you question is regarding ping times, then here is the
evidence:
Smoke1 is on the Colo's "blended" network:
http://smoke1.m5hosting.com/cgi-bin/smokeping.cgi?target=World.USA.FaceBook
Smoke2 is single FastE to Cogent only. No redundancy:
http://smoke2.m5hosting.com/cgi-bin/smokeping.cgi?target=World.USA.FaceBook
Can't use them as a single provider though. They have those peering
fights and periodic maintenance. If you need 99.999% then you need to
have more than one carrier anyway.
Cheers,
Mike