I’ve not posted here for a while, been insanely busy but today those lovely people at Cogent kicked me out of my blogging slumber with a shocking display that I simply had to share.<\/p>\n
Cogent for those who do not know is a very large Tier 1 ISP, known mostly for many disputes with other ISPs about peering<\/a>, it has become so bad that in the UK at least they are basically a complete no-go zone for anyone. <\/p>\n I’ve previously delt with Cogent when a client signed up for a few mbit of Cogent bandwidth on the basis of a \u00a35\/mbit pricing structure, they soon realised that you get what you pay for. Even between racks in the same Data Center you could not reach each other without first hopping over to Europe. I’ve attempted to resolve this at the time with Cogent and the other ISPs and both confirmed that it is essentially a waste of time. Cogent said they can’t speak to the ISP in question since most of the UK ISP industry can’t stand them. The other ISP basically laughed out loud about being ‘suckered’ into buying Cogent bandwidth.<\/p>\n This is confirmed elsewhere, search the Renesys Blog<\/a> for Cogent and you’ll find a lot of information about Cogent, mostly bad news. From an article on their blog about Cogent in the UK<\/a> you will see this:<\/p>\n \nFirstly, Cogent has a fairly serious Europe problem right now. They \nAs a result of this approach to business, Cogent has much less This basically confirms my experience with Cogent and those of many I have spoken too. As such if you choose to support Cogent you will basically be forced to:<\/p>\n For these reasons, everyone who I know with Cogent bandwidth use them as last resort backup carriers, they are cheap and basically shit, but ok enough to use as a backup when everything else failed.<\/p>\n Over the last few years Cogent has contacted me direct via email to attempt to sell their wares, always the threads end withe me saying something along these lines:<\/p>\n\n
\nhave been aggressively attacking the European market for a few years
\nnow and making some solid headway. They bought a couple of carriers
\n(Lambdanet Spain and France, Carrier1 in Germany among them), ruthlessly
\nintegrated them and then proceeded to undersell the market by a factor
\nof 50-80%. This has made them many enemies.\n<\/p>\n
\neffective peering in Europe than do many of its larger competitors.
\nMost of the European PTTs refuse to peer with Cogent anywhere on the
\nEuropean continent. Recently, some large US carriers (among them
\nLevel (3) ) seem to have adopted a similar approach. This means that
\nwhen Cogent sells capacity in Europe, it is forced to drag that
\ntraffic back to the US to hand it off to its peers here. Of course
\nthat means that if the ultimate destination is European, the traffic
\nhas to travel back. This is a burden on both Cogent and the European
\ncarrier and, of course, the customers on both sides. But it’s
\nunlikely to change because of just how much hate there is for Cogent
\namong European networkers. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n
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