I hear people bragging about Cogent alot... and then I hear some saying how awful it is... is it good or bad? What is it -- just another backbone provider like Qwest, ATT, Sprint, UUNet, etc. etc.? What makes it so good or bad?

-ee99ee

i guess its good for its price

but i have heard thats its not the most "reliable" provider.

so when using cogent ur best off having some other backup lines just incase

There are fair bit of posts about Cogent here, including threads of the same nature as your post.

Try search button.

Personally Cogent aren't all that bad. However a lot of cheap hosting companies offer Cogent as a standalone provider with no redundancy. That probably contributed to the image it is bad since once they are down, you are down for good.

Also some of them oversell and cram too many, overloading the networks and affecting the pings as well.

Their cut throat pricing adds to the perceived image that they are cheap and therefore bad.

Certainly they don't have the best peering but speed wise they are excellent. I have access to a server with 1gbit Cogent connection, and I can hit 8-9MB/s to some external servers easily. So download speeds wise, they are pretty good. Ping wise isn't shabby so far from what I can see either. Most places, I can hit below 50ms and even 30ms.

I am sure others will have other experience. But after using them, I think they may be unnecessarly villified.

But where do you have access to cogent 1Gbit connection? (As far as I know modern hosts usually use 10Mbit and 100Mbit, also your speed is more like 100Mbit than 1Gbit connection)

That's on single connection. Total max is a lot more, and the external servers are on 100mbit nics.

Keep in mind that connectivity and peering is what makes a transit provider, not speed.

As long as they don't oversubscribe, which it would appear that you are lucky enough to be in a location where they don't, than of course speeds are going to be good. However, if they don't have solid peering, than your routes aren't going to be very good, and if they don't have good network hardware holding their network up (which at least where i've seen, including one wilshire, they don't) than again, it's not going to be that great :)

Rumor has it that there's a 4 port hub in the cage of Cogent here in the building I'm in which is made by a manufactor who starts with a N, ends with etgear. ;)

Definately not to say they use low end hardware, however from what I've seen and heard, they don't use the top of the line rock solid never die hardware.

Yes. Which is why I mention pings are still quite good. Oversubscribed networks can affect the pings as well and a lot of times that is blamed on Cogent instead of the server provider. Routing wise seems to be improving as far as I can tell.

Not sure about the hardware part as I never visited Cogent before, but since you have, you are right. Just that not sure if that's across board.

I'm pretty definite they don't use low end hardware across the board, and I think for certain purposes they are great (office internet connection mainly for surfing the net...etc...)

However they are not meant to be a primary/main provider not BGP'd, but than again, that's what you said to begin this thread, so I guess we are in agreeance :)