Mike Tancsa wrote:
They are also one of the biggest providers... Proportionally speaking,
if they had the same percentage of failures as a provider 10% of their
size, it would appear Cogent is "worse" as there would be more
reports. Also, in my experience, I find Cogent pretty good about
admitting to outages, even if we didnt notice it. Some providers on
the other hand do everything possible to hide any issues...
Sorry - I don't buy the "They're big, so they have more problems". I've
never seen the frequency of network issues with any Tier 1 (for want of
a better nomenclature) that I have seen with Cogent. Admitting a problem
does not help when their facilities do not have enough capacity to route
around the failure of one of their POPs.
Cogent's pricing in Canada is not that far off from a number of other
providers I could choose from so to say "you get what you pay for"
misses a bit of detail. They are not the cheapest, but in that price
range, I like the service they offer and have found them a relatively
reliable provider. There are other "premiere" / "Tier 1" providers
that I found gave worse service, had billing that would drive my AP
people crazy and were far more difficult to deal with from a trouble
ticket perspective.
Cogent have been 50% cheaper than most other providers I have used, as
far as raw IP services go. They have also had exponentially more network
issues than other transit providers. Usually it's stuff that makes life
difficult, such as a failure at a POP that causes congestion somewhere
else - I'd be okay if their local POP died and took out my BGP session,
but alas that only happened once when they blew some breakers one day.
David
