Querstions about COGENT and their services...

[david at davidcoulson.net (David Coulson)]

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