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Originally posted by VirtuMike
My criticisms of Cogent are things you would not normally think about. First, run a trace off their network. Their backbone looks kind of like a giant figure 8 - http://www.cogentco.com/home.html . This is a problem. Any one point on that network has only two points of failure upstream. If one point does fail, it cuts off the entire flow in that direction and forces the rest of the path to reverse and depending on the location of the failure can force almost the entire half of the country to follow the working path. If they're operating near 50% or higher capacity on the middle states this can cause full network outage. That's the theory anyway.
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Ahhh good post Mike
I'm going to run some more traces to some spots in the mid-west as you suggested & see if I can find some places where cogents hops are noticeably worse than say verio, qwest or level3 in the same areas. But back when I did this before, there weren't any noticeable differences. Maybe you could give me some specific "to" and "froms"? I'm just trying to
see what everyone else is
talking about here for myself. As I said, I have access to cogents network now, as well a few others. I would love to do some comparisions
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Cogent has also repeatedly refused to answer questions about their peering to me. They are especially tight lipped when I ask about oceanic peering and transit. That's not a good sign. I have been talking to a couple other providers about them and they said that when they switch people from Cogent to another provider that their traffic goes up. They all attributed it to international users that were timing out from bad peering overseas.
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One thing I'll say about them.. the reps you can get ahold of pretty easy, but it's hard to get ahold of people in the main office there. I'll ask the rep I'm talking to about international traffic & throw in some international traceroutes to cogent hosted sites, but I tested them awhile ago and it didn't look horribly out of line with anyone else.
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The $1000 a month plan there is for people who do not host. It's for people who pull down more than they push up. When you're using Cogent's model, the hosting people are the first to jump on board as well as the dominanant users of bandwidth. When you try to set up a peering you have to be on the same level in that area as the people you're trying to peer with. The big providers don't want to peer with you if all you're doing is hosting. They want to sell you a line, which is pretty much what they're doing if all you're doing is pushing. So Cogent encourages apartment building owners and companies to pull so they can get their ratios in line so people will peer with them. It's pretty rational.
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That's a good strategy to balance things out. With cogents pricing I would think it would be a lot easier for building owners to swallow.
But thanks for the reply. Very informative.