Cogent bandwidth

[Zeeble]

Is Cogent bandwidth any good at all? What is the difference between Cogent bandwidth and other bandwidth?

 

[Crusader]

Well at the moment I believe Cognet and some other major ISPs are feuding, their upstream may not be available to 15% of the world.

 

[Virpus]

Yeah, many datacenter's were effected by this, including GNAX, our provider, but after just a couple hours, they re-routed traffic. IMHO, they did a hell of a job!

But yeah, basically Cogent is sending more traffic over Level 3 than Level 3 is sending through Cogent, which means L3 is getting ripped off basically. They have been warning Cogent for a while that it was going to happen, but they never acted, so in the end Level 3 disconnected their services, causing a lot of problems world-wide.

Just yesterday, Cogent and L3 came up with an agreement, and restored full peering.

I wouldn't recommend Cogent, but it's a cheap option to go if you're on a limited budget.

 

[cayne]

I would try to get other bandwidth than Cogent, never heard something good about their quality.

 

[PolurNET]

Ah, so GNAX was affected? I hope NAC and TP were not though... Thanks for the heads up, Kenneth!

 

[jmweb]

Anyone whom uses a BGP network was not affected. However if your datacenter does not have a BGP network, or just primarly uses cogent then yes you were affected.

ThePlanet uses Cogent for their unmetered servers which means only unmetered customers were affected as ThePlanet has a network specifically for cogent.

NAC also uses Cogent however they use cogent within their entire network. Therefore yes NAC was affected but I doubt they were affected for long as the NAC team has some high end engineers.

Would I worry? If you couldn't bring up your site yesterday then yes I would worry as your host isn't using a BGP network or only uses cogent.

As for us, we use high end networks and not the valued low quality networks, so no we were not affected.

Cogent is the cheapest bandwidth you can buy. By Level3 terminating their agreement with Cogent, it actually increases the value of Level3's network as they removed the lowest valued network.

 

[dc1pop]

My sites are hosted at NAC havent recived no downtime. I have all my sites monitored.

 

[Virpus]

Yes, but NAC has redundant providers. It doesn't mean nothing is wrong with Cogent though.

 

[ChrisKL]

General rule is to stay clear of Cogent. It has a bad reliability rating (it's very cheap, and it's not because they're a market leader). Not something a business site wants, when a 3hr drop can lose them thousands of dollars.

Best bandwidth is InterNAP, as it's very redundant and is peered with like 8 major networks to be darn sure if half the internet drops off the face of the Earth, it'll still be online. Problem there is only a few hosts have it (Fluid Hosting is one), and it's almost twice expensive than any other bandwidth. I had it before, and it gave superb page load times and pings from across the nation.

CKL