What's wrong with Cogent?

[tnats]

Ok, I don't want this to turn into a flame war or anything, I just want some reasonable reaons why Cogent is so 'bad'. I don't work for Cogent or anything, I just don't understand why they get bashed so much.

My experience with Cogent has been 4 years with 1 downtime that wasn't their fault. I have over 5000 ISP customers off it and never have any routing issues. Everyone has peers with them so I don't see any huge lag times between point A and point B. And for 8-9$ a meg, it's a steal. Am I just lucky that where my fiber comes into downtown Denver is very reliable?

I just don't get why it's so 'bad'. People call other bandwidth providers 'premium' and unless you are playing just games (even though there are 1000s of game servers hosted on Cogent backbones), if your customer gets to from point A to point B within a reasonable amount of time, they won't notice.

Someone please enlighten me.

Thanks,
Tom


Example Cogent peering with att.net for Comcast customers:

8 g5-0-0.core01.dfw03.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.5.177) 21.661 ms 21.385 ms 22.250 ms
9 192.205.32.253 (192.205.32.253) 22.190 ms 21.937 ms 21.863 ms
10 tbr2032501.dlstx.ip.att.net (12.123.16.198) 50.537 ms 49.265 ms 50.037 ms

I've never personally used Cogent, well actually I did through Hivelocity for a server I once had, and the connection was *ok*. I think the bashing started with the pricing, since it was cheap it got branded as "cheap bandwidth". I have heard from others though of slow performance, outages etc, but as mentioned I can't enlighten in detail since I've personally not experienced issues.

Interesting comments. I have a lot of customers who will not use cogent.

I look forward to checking back and hearing why people are opposed.

I've used Cogent for about a year without any issues. I personally prefer it to the "premium providers". Great prices, good peering, awesome support, no objections.

[Everyday]

Cogent is terribly oversold in the Philadelphia area. The connections we had with them were always experiencing packetloss and latency. I wouldn't use Cogent as long as I'm in this business.

[Galaxy-Hosts]

Over the past month I have talked to several data centers, some of which do not use Cogent, and they have all told me that Cogent has gotten alot better and is a very decent provider now. Their opinion was they got their bad rep a few years back when they did have alot of problems.

I love how it almost doesn't matter how good Cogent really is, just how good we think they are
Not that I'm a philosopher or anything.

We use a lot of Cogent, and they are our work-horse peer if you ask me. The only thing is that their packet loss and latency is too much for voip customers, they need something different. But for 90% of all web customers, Cogent gets the job done.

[edison]

Cogent also works smoothly here. Their previous problems probably got hem even better now.