Cogent

by R.I. Pienaar | Jan 19, 2009 | Uncategorized

I’ve not posted here for a while, been insanely busy but today those lovely people at Cogent kicked me out of my blogging slumber with a shocking display that I simply had to share.

Cogent for those who do not know is a very large Tier 1 ISP, known mostly for many disputes with other ISPs about peering, it has become so bad that in the UK at least they are basically a complete no-go zone for anyone. 

I’ve previously delt with Cogent when a client signed up for a few mbit of Cogent bandwidth on the basis of a £5/mbit pricing structure, they soon realised that you get what you pay for.  Even between racks in the same Data Center you could not reach each other without first hopping over to Europe.  I’ve attempted to resolve this at the time with Cogent and the other ISPs and  both confirmed that it is essentially a waste of time.  Cogent said they can’t speak to the ISP in question since most of the UK ISP industry can’t stand them.  The other ISP basically laughed out loud about being ‘suckered’ into buying Cogent bandwidth.

This is confirmed elsewhere, search the Renesys Blog for Cogent and you’ll find a lot of information about Cogent, mostly bad news.  From an article on their blog about Cogent in the UK you will see this:

Firstly, Cogent has a fairly serious Europe problem right now. They
have been aggressively attacking the European market for a few years
now and making some solid headway. They bought a couple of carriers
(Lambdanet Spain and France, Carrier1 in Germany among them), ruthlessly
integrated them and then proceeded to undersell the market by a factor
of 50-80%. This has made them many enemies.

As a result of this approach to business, Cogent has much less
effective peering in Europe than do many of its larger competitors.
Most of the European PTTs refuse to peer with Cogent anywhere on the
European continent. Recently, some large US carriers (among them
Level (3) ) seem to have adopted a similar approach. This means that
when Cogent sells capacity in Europe, it is forced to drag that
traffic back to the US to hand it off to its peers here. Of course
that means that if the ultimate destination is European, the traffic
has to travel back. This is a burden on both Cogent and the European
carrier and, of course, the customers on both sides. But it’s
unlikely to change because of just how much hate there is for Cogent
among European networkers.

This basically confirms my experience with Cogent and those of many I have spoken too.  As such if you choose to support Cogent you will basically be forced to:

• Buy a lot of other bandwidth since if you’re hoping to serve UK customers, Cogent is a terrible sole carrier to have
• You will need to invest in extra hardware, extra admin time, extra complex routing infrastructure and additional overhead on your teams
• You will forever be at the mercy of everyone who hates Cogent, you will find your self randomly falling off the internet, randomly de-peering with vast swaths of the internet and basically the whole thing will be a pain in the behind.

For these reasons, everyone who I know with Cogent bandwidth use them as last resort backup carriers, they are cheap and basically shit, but ok enough to use as a backup when everything else failed.

Over the last few years Cogent has contacted me direct via email to attempt to sell their wares, always the threads end withe me saying something along these lines:

Furthermore we’d prefer to use companies who do not directly
contact us with marketing material, please remove us from your lists
for future contact.

Today again one of my clients got a mention on Techcrunch which resulted in more spam from Cogent, again to an email address totally unrelated to my business activities, not listed in whois records for the client or anything like that.  The sales person even had the nerve to copy the email that the above quote is from in his mail to me asking if I can have a conference with him.

My response was the usual, no we don’t deal with spammers, you were told to leave us alone now please stop bothering us.  Which resulted in an amazingly pushy email from the sales person, quoted below:

No doubt that writing when being asked not to is, well, borderline. That
said, it is both of our responsibilities to make sure that all options
are explored. You need to confirm that you are aware of all vendors
information, and mine includes getting it out there. 

.

.

Admittedly, this is difficult to resolve via email. However, if I didn’t
think that we could compliment your service, I wouldn’t persist.

This is just amazing, this person really think he can presume to tell me what my responsibilities are, what I need to do, and that I have to indulge his blatant b/s.

After I again pointed out that they were asked to stop mailing me and I pointed out that they were using a private email address held by a UK citizen and as such under the data protection laws they need to stop contacting me when asked, they once again mailed me demanding further information about my customers.  They really are on par with simple Viagra spammers.

Does anyone really think this kind of heavy handed tactic gets them business?

The worst part of it is the ISP who currently provide a large part of our b/w are Cogent customers, Cogent Sales people do not think twice to approach clients of their clients and try to undercut them – effectively trying to steal their customers business away from them. 

Why would any business support such a company?  I would not, I would effectively be negligent in my duties to my clients to ever recommend these clowns for anything since they are just a nightmare waiting to happen.