Re: Honest Cogent opinions without rhetoric.

[Daniel Golding <dgolding () burtongroup com>]

On 3/8/06 8:57 AM, "Patrick W. Gilmore" <patrick () ianai net> wrote:

> On Mar 8, 2006, at 1:56 AM, alex () pilosoft com wrote:
>
>
>
> > With regard to depeerings: they are a fact of life on the internet
> > - and
> > as a service provider, you should always have multiple transits,
> > for this
> > and other reasons. Yes, you obviously will have more risk of being
> > caught
> > in a depeering fight if you are buying from $low-price-leader-du-jour,
> > because these are the ones more likely to be depeered by $big-boys for
> > being "too-competitive". ;)
>
> De-peering is a fact of life, but Cogent takes something that other
> people consider a nuisance and turn it into a Real Problem.  No other
> network has been "de-peered" for multiple days multiple times in the
> last several years.  No other network has refused to provide some
> type of help (e.g. credits) for customers who were affected by the
> depeering.  (Hell, Cogent offered more help to L3's customers than
> they did to their own - although many people say they did not honor
> those offers.)
One way to look at this is that you are getting a very low price per mbps
with Cogent. Therefore, when Cogent's CEO decides its in his best interest
to partition for a week over a depeering situation, their customer's role is
to suck it up. You get what you pay for, and in this case, that means
mediocre to average transit with periodic partitioning. Frankly, for the
price, that's pretty darn good.

If your choice is between Cogent and some other provider, you are making a
mistake. Cogent (and other low cost transit providers) can be part of a
balanced stable of transit providers. Folks who single-home to Cogent
deserve whatever Darwin delivers to them.

Do what Peter Cohen said and run an RFP. Every competent network engineer
should be able to write an Internet transit RFP.

-- 
Daniel Golding