Cogent Communications

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Cogent Communications Group, Inc.
CCOI Logo
Type of Company Public (NASDAQ: CCOI)
Founded 1999
Headquarters Washington, D.C.
Key people Dave Schaeffer Founder/CEO
Reed Harrison President/COO
Tad Weed CFO
Industry Telecommunications
Revenue $135.21 million USD (2005)
Operating income $60.46 million USD (2005)
Net income $67.52 million USD (2005)
Employees 340
Website www.cogentco.com

Cogent Communications is a discount Internet Service Provider. It has a facilities-based network spanning 22,500 miles and provides service in over 95 cities across 14 countries.

Cogent offers several services including dedicated Internet service, colocation services, and Layer 2 point-to-point services in areas where it has its own last-mile network connections.

Cogent is controversial in the ISP market because of its highly competitive prices, and because it has been depeered on more than one occasion by other ISPs such as AOL, France Telecom and Level 3, leading to temporary IP reachability problems between Cogent and the depeered network. In some instances, the companies that depeered Cogent, ended up reconnecting to Cogent due to external pressure (Level 3) from customers that were severely impacted by the aggressive tactics and in others (France Telecom and AOL) Cogent was forced to purchase transit from Verio to reach those parts of the Internet. Cogent currently maintains direct connectivity to France Telecom's network, though it's unknown whether it is settlement-based or settlement-free; DNS PTR records on the router interfaces appearing in traceroutes seem to suggest the former.

Cogent currently has direct peering with many Tier 1 Providers.

The extent and tier of peering and connectivity are substantial competitive issues that encourage sales and much controversy and marketing typically revolves around claims by those who are not indisputably in a particular tier. Carriage of traffic is itself a substantial business issue that is often involved in disputes, since those carrying it for the longest distance tend to have greatest costs and Cogent is a major source of traffic, with its customers generating carriage costs that someone must pay for. This leaves Cogent with a strong incentive to route the traffic away from its own networks, while those receiving the traffic have a strong incentive to demand payment for transit instead of accepting (free, called settlement-free) peering. Peering, unpaid, is typically completely satisfying to both parties mainly when the traffic levels are roughly equal, otherwise some payment is often demanded.

Cogent itself has been somewhat clumsy at times, in August 2006 temporarily blocking access to leading web site Wikipedia and several others as a result of the expiration of a third party leased IP address space contract.

[edit] External links