Cogent Bandwidth
 

ooh this might be a long post:

I've seen a lot of people trash talk "Cogent Bandwidth" like its some sort of disease or something, lets try to set the record straight here:

After almost a year of experience with their lines I think a lot of the trash talking is due to hosts who are locked into higher cost term commitments with other providers. They are not (yet) able to purchase the minimum ($3000+facility space) worth of bandwidth cogent sells due to losing business to the companies offering cheaper cogent based service at rock-bottom prices (ie Rackshack & the countless others).

Another possibility is that the hosts that are having problems competing with cogent just don't have it available to them in their area. Cogent is only available in the MAJOR naps in the USA (they available in about 16-18 metro areas). For example, if I have a hosting business in Flagstaff, AZ which is ~3 hours away from the nearest cogent access point in Phoenix, AZ - odds are I wont be getting Cogent bandwidth if my network is currently established in Flagstaff, AZ. So I think a lot of people (I've seen on web hosting forums) resort to perpetuating the trash talking in this situation because they have nowhere else to turn.

If your laying there on the ground and someones beating you sensless, you have a couple options: 1) go into the fetal position and hope they will go away, or 2) kick em in the balls, throw dirt in their face, or whatever other last ditch tactics you can muster up to survive. :Graucho

Anyway I think cogent has the largest pure data network capacity out there (that's what I was told by the rep anyway) :1orglaugh. But from what I understand (by people who use them and unbiased network admins) they have a pretty solid & beefy network, they have just had problems in the past with peering (from the other Tier1 providers) - which is quite understandable considering the prices they hit the market with.

I just think they get a bad deal on the net from hosts described above & the users that hear about it on the forums and spread it around like the plague - without ever having firsthand experience of their service.

I think one of the main things people like to say is that their peering arrangements are bad. They might have been - awhile ago when they were first starting out with their crazy prices. I could easily see how the other Tier1 providers wouldn't want to play nice with them at all - and for good reason :). But now Cogent is probably pushing so much bandwidth that it wouldn't be very smart for the other Teir1's to mess with Cogents traffic in a way that would make their network perform bad. From what I understand peering is a two-way street, or, what comes around goes around. :) Another thing is cogent IS a Tier 1 provider of course - in case anyone is thinking they are some sub-standard rogue company.

Anyway, I'm defending them here like this because I am going to be picking up some beefy lines from them myself pretty soon. I have done my homework on them & researched the hosting companies that have talked about them on forums (whois info, and emails asking them for specifics) and they either wont reply, wont backup what they are saying with some sort of reprouduceable network stats, or they don't live anywhere near a cogent access point.

But I would like to encourage anyone out there with a differeing opinion to prove to me wrong, right now - not with unverifiable stories, but with some reproduceable network stats or something that shows how Cogents Tier1 bandwidth/network is somehow consistently inferior than the other Tier 1 providers. And if you can, please do, because I am planning to make a pretty large commitment with them.

Like I said, I have been using cogent bandwidth (through other hosts) for almost a year & they have been pretty solid.

So to all you cogent bashers out there.. here's your chance, bring on the reproduceable proof :)

Their peering argreements absoltely SUCK. That is the problem with them.

They (Cogent) bought the assets of the old PSI network so they could peer somewhere.

It's fine and dandy buying a Gig of pipe, but if you are stuck with it within their little network, what's the point?!

Please back this up with something informative...

Show me something that suggests they have less than adequate peering agreements (looking glass? anything verifyable), tell me where to trace from and to using cogent and other providers for a comparision or something. SHOW me that their network sucks.

This is exactly the kind of post that I'm talking about.

Cogent is massive now :1orglaugh . Peering is a two way street you know? You can't shut out or mess with the traffic of one network and expect for your traffic to reach that same providers network without being mangled just as bad ;)

Hi Gobigtime,

yeh, your pretty much right about cogent bandwith.

When they first came on the scene, and until just a little while ago, there network sucked, uptime wasn't that great, etc.

But I have 1 server using cogent, and it seems to be rocking all the time. I really haven't had any down times to speak off, and pings are good. I do test d/l 's from my cable modem to the server, and download at about 350k per sec / 50 meg file. with cable at 3meg d/l speeds.

actually if they had cogent lines here in portland, or., not sure if they do, I would go get 1 of those 3k per month lines, and play around a little :))

peace

Todd

I have noting but good things to say about cogent. I've been with many hosts in the past 4 years in this biz and so far the best I had/have is swiftwill which uses cogent as a primary pipe. I've been with them for a year now and never had a downtime at all or any major problems due to cogent connection or them and I use 2000gigs+ of bandwidth a month.

It's not the congent that is to blame for some bad experiences which some of you may have, but the host you deal with. If the host is solid and they know what they're doing, you won't have any problems, they usually have backups in case the primary provider goes down. So before you say anything bad about cogent, make sure it's not the host that is having the problems keeping your box alive.

my :2 cents: :thumbsup

1) Well it's obvious you work for them.
2) Find me a Boardwatch or Keynote report which says how "massive" they are.
3) The only traceroutes I can do to their network (since I know of no other IPs from them) goes through the old PSI network (which isn't a bad thing, but it isn't a good thing either *cough*Savvis*cough*.

We are on 2 gigs of Cogent in our west coast facility. All the haters came out when they found they couldnt compete with it.
Best line of defense was to bash and spread fear of downtimes and bankruptcy...both of wich can happen to any provider.
It has been rock solid for 13 months now.WE also have 5 other providers as well.

Bad news is...the fear mongoring worked to an extent. A day does not go by that I wont get an email like this:
"Hi I hear you have Cogent, and that if I put my sites on it I will go broke because of all the downtimes and they might go out of business, my cousins brothers buddy told me this" .

Well month after month we have proiven this is false.

Good news is....We have premium BGP4 routed bandwith close to the same prices now so if you just cant stand the "C" word , you have a choice with us.

Todd if your serious about wanting a 100 mb pipe, let me know.
:winkwink:

i have a box at cologroup , and honestly it has not gone down more than 5 minutes so far in the past 5 months...i'm pushing about 7000 gigs there as well ... maybe just my luck :thumbsup

What's obvious is you didn't read my full post. If you did you would see that I am shopping bandwidth right now myself. You would be a fool not to do your homework on cogent before passing them up as an option.

What's also obvious is they have a bad rep from a lot of trash talking out there.

I don't really know about all the PSI/Cogent/Savvis stuff.. so maybe you could explain it instead of *coughing* it out ;) I have no fuggin clue what your coughing about there. Tried to google it though - didn't find anything that seems scandalous?

I know what the cogent guy told me about the few times that I have talked to him so far for presales info. He did mention that when they first started they were or bought or branched from PSI or something. One of the questions I asked him about was their CAPACITY, because I was afraid with the prices they were at, that they would reach it quickly & start overselling. He said that the network was at around 5% or 2% at the time (a few couple three months ago, that cogent had the largest network capacity on the market & told me the capacity.. I forgot what it was though 80 something... I think it was bigger than gigabits though.

But really man, your talking shit here, and *coughing* out stuff without explaining it & making assumptions/accusations about me just because I am trying to be an informed buyer here. And trying to suggest to other people to not pass up a good deal if it exists. I'm saying back up the claims, that's all.

If the network sucks, I'll have to think of something else.. but I've been shopping, reading & watching for around 3-4 months now and it seems pretty solid to me.

No, I wasn't passing judgement by any means.

To use them for primary bandwidth is a crap shoot, that's all I'm saying. I have been in the bandwidth business for over five-years now, and anyone who breaks into market at prices that low, has to be skimping somewhere, but then again, that may not be the case.

I have gotten deals as low as $54 a meg (for 200M) in the Midwest from a backbone that is ranked consistently on Boardwatch and Keynote.

Once Cogent gets consistent high mark from third parties, I will look to them as well.

Cogent also bought most of NetRail for the peering relationships which they turned around and fucked.

we have 600Mbit direct from them and use it for our hosted galleries, ... yes, it is located in one of the former PSI datacenters and not through a cogent upseller ... it just simply rocks, and let me assure you, most of the downtime expirienced through cogent upsellers is because of kids playing with routers. had it for 3 month now, 3 month uptime, superfast, and supercheap ... I love it !!!

And all I"m saying is back up your statements. You're letting them fly one after another without anything to back it up. Now cogent is a crap shoot :1orglaugh because Boardwatch and Keynote doesn't promote them.

My guess is its not very profitable to help drag the industry down by supporting the company that comes in and lowballs everyone -- irregardless of how good they are performing.

If you can get "premium" bandwidth for $54/mbit for 200megs, then you are only paying $24/mbit more & committing to twice as much as you would have to with cogent. I'm also willing to bet that you have cogent to thank for prices that low ($54/mbit) from the "premium" providers.

Anyone who is familiar with cogents business model knows why they can do what they are doing. They are data only (no voice), they have 1 product - bandwidth & their prices are publicly known/avail (they do the down and dirty VPN stuff too I guess) . It comes in a couple flavors of course, but from a billing & administration standpoint it's cake. Now your "premium" providers go nuts trying to sell you all these value added services and confuse you with prices and term commitments and theres sales people in the middle trying to bleed their commission out of you and all that. Blah. I know, I've been shopping it =( If you think about it, you'll understand why cogent has more of a chance to outlast these other guys. Their ship is much more easy to sail. Because of their pricing & business model, they don't need a billion techs - they can do this on a skeleton crew in comparision to the "premium" guys your talking about.

Arguing with me without data to back up your claims is pointless -- I've done my homework. You either haven't or don't want to.
Show me links or tell me how to see that the network is less adequate than the other providers. Hell, tell me what provider will hook up for $54/mbit for 200mbits for that matter :P... even that price is probably too low for you to publicly quote thier name/network. Games.

----------------------------------------------------------
heh I just re-read this thread and it does sound like I work for cogent :) I assure you I don't though. It just fuggin irks me to read all these cogent bashing threads everywhere (not just here, but the one this morning on GFY where someone said "Whatever you do don't go with cogent" set me off I guess).. I don't like the cogent trash talk because I am under the impression from all the homework I have done, that it's false & also because I plan to make a pretty big committment with them. So again, if someone can talk me out of it with comparative stats or something PLEASE DO.

How so? Please explain in detail (googling for it now). This stuff is interesting to me. When was this? I've already mentioned (and others did too) that it was known that Cogent got battered around pretty good when they were first hitting a the market - which was what.. like $200-$250/mbit was "dirt cheap" at the time & cogent comes out with pricing about a tenth of that :).. oh yeah, thats going to be welcomed with open arms. But now it's too late (for the other providers). Cogent sank its teeth in too deep. They have to compete. Within a year they will probably have direct competition with prices in line with their own. I'm sure there are providers out there right now that are converting their networks to a more cost effective data-only network =)

1. I was too lazy to read your entire post word for word :).
2. I will never put up my reputation (not like I have one anyway) and refer a client who's business relies on the Net to go with Cogent as their sole backbone.
3. I doubt if I will ever refer them to anyone looking for secondary bandwidth.
4. I don't feel like "doing my homework" on Cogent.
5. I play no games, email me - [email protected] - and I will be proud to share any information with you.

I honestly look at this - http://www.internethealthreport.com/ - not for raw data, but to look at Keynote's perspective. Not that Keynote is the bible of bandwidth, but they are the best we have at the time.

If you do end up buying from them, best of luck! I didn't mean to get you all pissed off about it all (unless that's what you were looking for :glugglug ).

http://www.cogentco.com/News/news_12032002.htm

So, they are selling 2M and a rack for $1000, or you can get 100M for $1000. Am I missing something here?

If your business is brokering bandwidth deals, that's a horrible thing to say/admit.


Yeah.. too bad cogents not on there. Thats a cool little app there. But like I said, it's not like they are being welcomed by the industry. The industry has accepted them with their peering arrangements because they HAVE TO. Because their own networks will suffer if they don't. However, that doesnt mean they have to invite them to all their parties and functions you know? So I get $24/mbit less than you, but I don't get this cool little network latency comparison (yet) - I'm cool with that :thumbsup (is your $54/mbit provider even up here directly? not their provider, but them)

But see, keynote and boardwatch might be frowned upon for welcoming cogent to their parties you know? It's probably not the best thing for them to do. It's not like there are/were tons of bandwidth providers out there trying to ruin the market - it was just one & from what I've read/heard - people like the companies listed there & keynote/boardwatch & the rest of them thought (hoped?) that if they shut cogent out, that they could keep their prices up and that cogent would just go away. Oops.

Ugh that kinda sucks for me. But yeah thats still a pretty decent deal in this market & thats under PSI. I mean a full rack is usually ~600 wholesale, and 2mbits.. well.. however you want to look at it. PSI is cogents like value added end of things now no? I dunno. I'm talking about the whored out bulk bandwidth pricing for them.

And that $1000/100mbit thing is a marketing scam unfortunately. I argued with them to no end about that. Tried to get them to give me some examples of sites/companies that do or would qualify for that price :). But no, the $3000 thing is the real deal if you actually plan to USE the bandwidth. Which is still perfectly good :)

BTW I think PSI still does T1/T3 and all that high-priced old school networking crap :).. so this is probably their attempt to get those people off of that stuff and into a datacenter where they can service them cheaper.

But if you want to post the news, lets post the link to it all:
http://www.cogentco.com/News/news_press.html

In all honesty, I probably should look to them as an alternative. When they broke to market, they were perceived upon as a "joke" and completely irrelevant.

I mean, I am brokering a $280 Integrated T1 right now which is unheard of in the industry (including local loop)...

I am interested in how things go with you (if you decide to use them).

Right.. this is the point I'm trying to make. When they first came on the scene, they were discounted & shunned and everyone assumed and hoped they would just disappear into bankruptcy -- but surprise!

But its posts like your original post - quick inappropriate sucker punches of flimsy, unresearched claims that get spread around the boards from one misinformed person to another that forced me to start this thread. I spose to vent a little, and also to issue a challenge to people like you - to back up the cogent bashing with something solid.

Review your original reply and maybe you'll understand why "Cogent Bandwidth" has the reputation it does.

Well, I honestly don't take the message boards very seriously. I consider it an outlet when I am bored or need to blow off steam. When I am "working" things are handled much more expediciously (sp??) and precise.

I still wouldn't recommend them for primary bandwidth :Graucho

Quit your bitching.

No games. I'll give you 200mbit of Verio here in the Switch and Data Southfield, Michigan facility for $50 per megabit. That's an offer open to everyone. I don't need Cogent here in Detroit to compete against their pricing.

:winkwink:

Brad

cogent isn't really cheap per say. They have cheap 'low commitement' prices. If you get in the high XGbps level.. you can get ~$40-$50/mbit prices from a lot of much better providers.

At this point I'm not sure how much your recomendation would matter - at least to people reading this thread :winkwink:


Anyway pleeeeeeeeeeease, if anyone is out there that can save me from this big mistake & show me how to find some negative network (real-time, current) reports on Cogent VS. anyone else - please do.

Hmm.. is there a cricket chirping icon? :)


(Btw for anyone that cares, our 'hosting company' will be opening for a small group of high-volume clients in around 6 weeks one provider or another - stay tuned)

You will. :winkwink:



Nah actually, we are going to keep a very small family of large clients. We need a ton of bandwidth for another project were going to be doing and just need to offset the minimum for us to get the scalability we need (have to take 300mbits from cogent to get in over fiber - scaleable to a 1000mbits from there)

I have some interesting perspective on Cogent. We use them for a couple megabits at a colo facility for hosting galleries. They're actually not bad. The problem we have is with the facility - they REALLY SUCK. We're talking timeouts within the facility and hours of downtime due to fiber cuts in the facility and tripping over the cables etc. But the Cogent has not been the problem yet and we have been there for about six months. FYI today we're missing a few hits coming through cogent but it's not that severe.

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.

Another downside to the topography is that the packets have to take an inordinately large number of hops to get to a peering point. Midwestern facilities have to run many hops to get the packets out. That's a problem as it takes time and adds many more points of failure. Plus if you look at their map it's seems that they're forcing all the traffic in the northeast to come through the same pipes. Currently Cogent is running slower for the same geographic distance than most.

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.

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.

My vision of Cogent in the future is very good. They have a system in place that is years ahead of everyone else. They came in after everyone made their mistakes and have a system with significantly lower costs than anyone else. But more importantly is their effort they are making with the last mile, the apartment buildings and offices. If you control the last mile you control the game. Ask Walmart about that strategy. My belief is that if they don't screw up, the concept is quite sound - they will have people hosting on their network and they will have people pulling from their network. Eventually everyone will be forced to peer with them to get access to their apartments and offices, and they'll be one of the most relevant players. The sooner they get their last mile customers, the faster this will happen. It's a matter of time and not screwing up. And I would like to see them get that backbone map looking a little more appealing.

Buy my content, we know what we're doing.

Yeah but that's ridiculous. If you are into networking enough to spend $40-$50k on a 1gbps line, you are probably going to save $10,000-$20,000/mo and go with the cheaper line. Unless you have money to burn or something - like IBM or other coporate giants & just want to pay so you have someone to scream at on the phone everytime a router burps somewhere. :)


And look! there is another one of those sly cogent-bashing comments... you say "you can get ~$40-$50/mbit prices from a lot of much better providers". What makes them much better?

Your losing focus of the thread.... if you plan to talk shit about cogent, your supposed to bring some form of proof to the table with it.

I feel bad for Cogent, they came out with these great prices for consumers (horrible prices for the industry) and people kick the shit out of them on the boards like this.

In the Swift Communications, -->ME<-- was a devout Cogent supporter.

We left Cogent last month for Global crossing because of a few key reasons.

1. Their Latency SUCKS. EVEN ONE MONTH AGO. Just looking at their network map, you can see why it sucks. they have like 13 peering points in the country, REFUSE to buy public peering for their over usage.

2. Downtime Sucks. They have it. A LOT. They are up and down all the time. Just looking at my mrtg made me cry. Since august I lost 400mbps in traffic. I didnt lose a single customer. eVERYONE got smaller.

3. I bought a second Gige from Gx, and moved my cogent there. the result was my usage went up 80mbps on the first day. NOT ALL YOUR TRAFFIC GETS TO YOUR MACHINE. I have a feeling cogent isnt accessible everywhere.

4. Cogent WAS a GREAT VALUE at 10/mbit. At 30/mbit, its hardly worth it considering you can get verio, yipes, above net, and a few others for around the same price on a GigE with 2x the quality ATLEAST.

5. Cogent offers no burstable pricing. that means it costs MORE than 30/mbit.

6. Contracts with bandwidth are irrelevant. If your upstream is fucking you, just leave them. pay your bill current and leave. Your upstream WILL make a deal so long as your current.

7. Cogent is COMPLETELY INFLEXIBLE. doing anything outside of the normal bounds will just blow their mind and confuse them.

8. Cogents non-technical support cant actually speak english. I have never spoken to a single person that didnt sound like a 3rd world immigrant. They dont understand what your saying, and dont know how to even use their own software.

9. Cogents Tech support staff is very good. when they answer the phone at least and if it doesnt relate to peering.

10. Cogent will raise your price w/ them whenever they feel like it, and will break their own contracts knowingly if it involves bilking more money out of you.

11. IF YOU USE TOO MUCH BANDWIDTH, THEY WILL NOT SELL YOU MORE. I had to setup several fake machines to spoof incoming traffic to satisfy their peering reqs. so basically cogent makes you ABUSE OTHER NETWORKS by setting up scripts to download constantly from other networks for their own benefit. When you are My size, the amount of abuse I would have to do to say Yahoo or someone is considerable. Despite being costly for me to write the code, and purchase additional servers, this is under handed and rather distasteful.

12. if your billing gets confused you will NEVER have it fixed. the only way to have it fixed is to talk to the VP of sales. He can tell the fucking retards in their billing dept to fix shit.

-----good points ----

1. Cogent has a great price to get you started at the 100mbps range. its hard for any non cogent to match 30/mbit at 100megs. not too hard at 1000 megs.

2. I LOVE their tech support when I can reach them. Hands down the friendliest support ever.

3. Back when I got 3 months free and bandwidth for 10/mbit, life was good.


Wells thats it. I switched cuz Global crossing is just better. With Gx its like I have a well trained War horse that I can trample others with inpunity. With Cogent, I feel like I'm holding the Leash to a rabid wolf. It bites whatever it sees, including you.

Ahhh good post Mike :thumbsup

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 :)

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.

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. :thumbsup

uhm I didn't talk shit nor did I bash them. What makes you think that if you get 1Gbps from cogent you won't have to spend the $ to get routing equipment that you would need for any other providers.

Peering and routing is what makes cogent lower quality than other providers:

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showth...ghlight=cogent

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showth...ghlight=cogent

Good post! And points to investigate & consider for sure.

I recently switched our Hosting company from Cogent to Global Crossing. Our International customers have never been happier. Some of our customers saw a huge increase in speed. Customers were seeing 27 hops being reduced to 10-12 hops from Russia, Netherlands, New Zealand and Australia.

If you want surfers outside of the U.S. to be able to access your sites fast, you really need to look at B/W providers who have great peering and a Global Backbone.

There wasn't anything wrong with Cogent other than slightly slower routing, we never experienced any down time in over a year with them. We just felt we needed a faster connection for our International customers. :2 cents:

I have to tell you that if Sin_Vraal jumps two feet in the air, it's a great idea to jump next to him. I've talked to many hosts, most are good, most are well informed, etc.

That guy knows his shit and has the vision. Not to kiss any ass or anything but he's on top of his game.

I think that after doing some extensive research, Global Crossing probably has the best international backbone of anyone out there. It's not just a fancy name. I know some guys that are burning mad GBLX bandwidth and they wouldn't still be there if it wasn't good. I think they still have wicked peering arrangements left over from when they hosted Yahoo and their deal with Exodus. The only thing is that I think they're still in bankruptcy, which does hamper long term planning. Cogent seems to be a satisfactory dirt cheap solution - especially if you don't need the far out international stuff.

After thinking about it I'm thinking I should move our galleries to Swift... Hmmmmm... Got space for Got Jizz?

BUY MY CONTENT. At least SEE my content, you'll fall in love with it. There's a reason that all the major programs use us, and that's RETENTION. It's porn crack for left handed surfers.

Ok.. lets take a look...

I'm just going to use the first servers listed for the countries at traceroute.org:

FROM RUSSIA: (via http://lg.telia.ru/ )

to cogent (cogentco.com) 12 hops
to cogent (my personal box) 22 hops
to globalX (swiftco.net) 12 hops
to level3 (yahoo.com) 13 hops
to verio (sinhost.com) 15 hops
to sprintlink (surewest.com) 15 hops

FROM NETHERLANDS: (via http://www2.nl.uu.net/netwerk/pops/trace.uunet )

to cogent (cogentco.com) 15 hops
to cogent (my personal box) 23 hops
to globalX (swiftco.net) 16 hops
to ???? (yahoo.com) 19 hops
to verio (sinhost.com) 19 hops
to ALTER (surewest.com) 13 hops (same network)


FROM NZ: (via http://www.kcbbs.gen.nz/cgi-bin/trace )

to cogent (cogentco.com) 14 hops
to cogent (my personal box) 13 hops
to globalX (swiftco.net) 15 hops
to level3 (yahoo.com) 14 hops
to verio (sinhost.com) 16 hops
to sprintlink (surewest.com) 15 hops

FROM AU: (via http://tcruskit.telstra.net/cgi-bin/trace )

to cogent (cogentco.com) 13 hops
to cogent (my personal box) 13 hops
to globalX (swiftco.net) 16 hops
to reach (yahoo.com) 11 hops
to verio (sinhost.com) 16 hops
to qwest (surewest.com) 13 hops

The BGP's @ surewest & yahoo are making this hard to stay consistent with the providers. If I do a ????? its because the last few hops were all ip's and I dont feel like looking them up ;)

Anyway for shits & giggles lets continue.....


FROM CANADA: (via http://www.xenitec.on.ca/cgi-bin/trace.cgi )

to cogent (cogentco.com) 17 hops
to cogent (my personal box) 21 hops
to globalX (swiftco.net) 16 hops
to cw (yahoo.com) 15 hops
to verio (sinhost.com) 16 hops
to ????? (surewest.com) 20 hops


FROM DENMARK: (via http://trace.tele.dk/cgi-bin/nph-first )

to cogent (cogentco.com) 19 hops
to cogent (my personal box) 27 hops!
to globalX (swiftco.net) 15 hops
to ???? (yahoo.com) TIMEOUT 18
to verio (sinhost.com) 17 hops
to globalX(surewest.com) 15 hops

FROM GERMANY: (via http://www.helios.de/cgi-bin/nph-trace.cgi )

to cogent (cogentco.com) 17 hops
to cogent (my personal box) 25 hops!
to globalX (swiftco.net) 19 hops
to L3 (yahoo.com) 12 hops
to verio (sinhost.com) 18 hops
to ALTER(surewest.com) 16 hops

Ok, now I'm burnt out on this :1orglaugh

Anyway yeah Cogent _customers_ do seem to take the long way around half the time there. BUT it's dirt cheap & still gets there =)
(I had ebay in the mix but they were timing out everywhere on ~ the 13th hop). Go figure.

explain this though: why does overall bandwidth increase when you move from cogent to a different provider (ie Cable & Wireless or Internap) ?

Well if that's actually happening, then some remote traffic isn't getting through. I couldn't find any place that didn't get through though - yet. I think we'll code something up to check the traceroutes to us first every 10 mins or so. I want to see the bandwidth not getting to me.

Ebay had a route down however :)

http://www.cogentco.com/Difference/quality_service.html

yeah sure. that is pure bullshit right there.

no they don't own the biggest backbone.

I also don't think they have made 2 cents yet.

why not spend the extra couple of bucks and buy bandwidth from a REAL backbone?

well you're in carolina. I see at least 10-20% of signup coming from countries at are not in North AM. For paysites (even free hosted shit for promotiong) good global response is important.

Hops aren't necessarily the best measurement (latency would be better) but here are the times to our NY servers which are hosted by MFN.com/AboveNet

FROM RUSSIA: (via http://lg.telia.ru/ )
13 hops to our network

FROM NETHERLANDS: (via http://www2.nl.uu.net/netwerk/pops/trace.uunet )
15 hops to our network

FROM NZ: (via http://www.kcbbs.gen.nz/cgi-bin/trace )
14 hops to our network

FROM AU: (via http://tcruskit.telstra.net/cgi-bin/trace )
15 hops to our network

FROM CANADA: (via http://www.xenitec.on.ca/cgi-bin/trace.cgi )
13 hops to our network

FROM DENMARK: (via http://trace.tele.dk/cgi-bin/nph-first )
15 hops to our network

FROM GERMANY: (via http://www.helios.de/cgi-bin/nph-trace.cgi )
12 hops to our network

Ok, take 300mbit then and you'll be able to scale up to 1000 with us as well. Or, just take 100 or 200 mbit as you need since we're already on 1000mbit fiber.

Brad