Travis,
Right now, we currently only have two Cogent transit connections live. One in Maryland, and one in DC. There is a story behind why that is the case right now, but I prefer to keep that off a PUBLIC INTERNET list. But just because that is the case today, does not mean that that has always been the case. NO, I have not taken 4-5 Transit connections from the same venue from diverse providers, and tested them side by side simultaneously in a scientific case. If you want that, go buy a InterNAP connection at $60/mb/mon, and they'll give you a monthly report of which of their 5-7 upstream are performing best to what destinations. But that experiment wouldn't really teach us anything. That would only test the performance from that specific Venue location. As I said before, different providers perform differently at different venues that they are best individually positioned to perform from. And any test I did here, really wouldn't help you in Idaho. A year ago, we setup a client to host their critical application servers with InterNAP bandwidth at Equinix Ashburn, because of the promise to Route Optimize between 5+ tier1s. Ironically, we are now in the process of moving them to CRGWest to colocate, where they will use us for Bandwidth, one hop from our DC Cogent transit. Why? Because my client has an office in DC, and their backup servers are in their office, and I have provided them their office bandwdith for the last 2 years. Their customers (spread between mutliple ISPs and cities) had more consistent performance testing to the backup/development servers accross my Cogent connection, than they do to the servers located behind InterNAP bandwdith. He said, WHY in the world should I continue to pay 6 times more, and not noticeably gain anything? But to answer your question..... I made generalizations based on my experiences over the years with different carriers. Not all my experiences comes from the DC market, and not all of my circuits use my own RapidDSL IP BLocks. I just started routing my own IP blocks w/BGP two years ago, and I have rather simple BGP needs, but I've been buying transit for 14 years. Some of my circuits used only upstream's IP and not even BGP, in some cases, for example when I bought circuits for specific events. I dont funnel all my network to one primary transit destination. I have three primary NOCs, and route shortest path to the closest transit connection, and wireless to the backup NOC where appropriate. (Note I used to have 4 Transit connections, but I recently disconnected two) I also rarely ever had more than two providers at one time, because I have no need for that. I tried a backup for a while, then when it didn't work well, at the end of the term, I tried another. In some cases, I was smart enough to buy service for only 1 month, to first see if I really gained anything. I often did that at a Carrier hotel, where a partner or reseller had a cage, and then if the link didn;t work well, well I never committed to buying colocation space, becaue the coloc space just added a few $1000 for no gain. But in the last 7 years (at different times) we have had 100 mbps connections from Yipes, Cogent, Level3, Global Crossing, Hurricaine, InterNap, Abovenet, and XO, and several Blended reseller carriers. They were NOT always from the same locations, because we dont currently colocate in carrier hotels, although that is about to change. I've gained more experience this year than others, because we had taken on a lot of temporary broadband jobs in remote cities. For example, we did LA last year for the Oscars, we did New York a few weeks ago, We partnered with another ISP in Chicago a few months ago. When we do these jobs, we use a local transit provider in that city. Sometimes we buy a circuit of our own, sometimes we find a local ISP and buy transit from their already live network. But it gives us teh opportunity to do some tests from that location for a couple of days, to see how it performed. We also have done short studies by askign other local ISPs if we could do some tests from their NOCs, and compare results. Often we might pick thirty well known sites to test latency or max capacity transfers to. But it does not require having a connection ourselves to test a provider's connection. Looking Glasses help. For example, we like to Use Quest's looking glass, and then test to various Internet sites. And then we can compare the results from our Cogent link to those same sites. We can then see at what providers the latency rises along paths. But there are many mroe looking glassses to compare. Then there are the 10 or so most common speed test sites. We've done studies for customers where they had DS3s with other carriers, and we offered to do free performance comparision before they'd agree to try/buy our service. So we'd go to their site, connect to their ISP, and run tests, and give them side by side comparisons to sites they said they accessed most. The challenge with testing is that testing latency is not the only meaning ful data. Whats also relevent to test is the packetloss and throughput end to end to key places. To do that it requires an uninhibited qualified envi ronment to transfer files or run things like Iperf from. Sometimes we do this by taking advantage of other locations that our large customers might have, and we'll remote desktop in, and test away with Jperf. I cant tell you who has the best uptime, Because Cogent is the only one that we have non-stop for many years. But measuring performance is a quick process. Can I measure average performance over a period of time and report it, NO. But my customers can. They switch to us, and they either experience better or worse performance in general perception, and I always ask, and they tell me what they really think. And sometimes our customers switch from us, and then switch back because they missed out high performance. Lastly, if I said Cogent outperforms all other providers, I didn't mean that. What I did mean is that, based on teh providers we tried, Cogent had felt to perform better on average than the other carriers we tried in those envirnments, based on tests we ran at that time. It should also be considered the reason this thread got my attention. I did not start out saying Cogent was the Best. I said Cogent was not second rate. All that really matters is the choices where I hadCogent, I compared to my other choice at that site, and Cogent won for that location. I dont have to prove Cogent is BEst in the World to everyone to prove my original point that Cogent is a high quality provider in many cases. And that I have not been exposed to a compelling reason to justify switching, based on performance. One more lastly, I'd argue that the changes in the Internet eco system changes who has better performance. For example, US bandwidth providers have excellent price/performance because they have signifcant influence in the market. This is because they control a large part of the world's hosting (specifically areas like LA and Ashburn). As different colo centers gain more market share it can change what ISPs have better performance. It really doesn't matter how good a network someone has, if the traffic is forced to take a specific route, that route determined performance. Global Routing is very complicated, and to say one provider has it mastered well beyond others would be rediculous. Tom DeReggi RapidDSL & Wireless, Inc IntAirNet- Fixed Wireless Broadband ----- Original Message ----- From: Travis Johnson To: WISPA General List Sent: Wednesday, October 21, 2009 8:42 PM Subject: Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams Tom, Can you explain how you tested that Cogent "outperformed" every other provider? The only way I know to test that is to actually have all those providers, running full BGP routes to your router and seeing where the traffic goes. Is that how you tested? Travis Microserv Tom DeReggi wrote: It should be noted that an Upstreams performance can be directly proportional to the location where they have more peering. In the DC and NY markets, Cogent has excellent performance and peering, and has shown to outperform EVERY provider we have tried, period. (And yes, some of the carriers we tried were Level3, XO, and Abovenet.) I recognize that Cogent's performance "may" not be as good for ALL markets where they potentially could have a weaker presence. But saying Cogent is only worthy of the 3rd or 4th transit connection is simply untrue. Cogent's weak point now is internal processes and communication. They've lost touch with the value of having personal Account Reps, and render the reps powerless to manage the accounts, in favor of the customer relationship managed by the clueless billing/collections department. Its a shame. You might even get away with saying Cogent has a few more short duration (less than 15 minutes?) outages than other carriers. But their tech support has been the best by far in the industry, and oversubscription has never been a problem from what I see. In picking a Transit provider its really a decision about where your traffic typically flows, and where you need good performance to. NOT anyone has best performance everywhere. For example, Hurricane has excellent performance AND they are inexpensive. They have a really good peering presensence in CA. I'm not confident that they have nearly as good a presence on the East coast though, but those that have used them on teh east coast that I know have been happy. We were considering using them. Abovenet has great Gig-E Transport. But their transit is expensive, and its because its more expensive for them to provide it, because they are not as well positioned to do it cost effectively, not because its necessarilly better. Level3 as well, has many strength. They have a lot of web host clients. It can really help performance to reach certain sites. Level3 also tends to blocks smaller BGP block announcements, more so than someone like Cogent. Level3 is good for a secondaryu because they usually have diverse routes. Some providers have good performance to France, Amsterdam, India, others dont. Savvis tends to have real peering to NY finacnial markets. I often see Blended bandwdith combining Global Cross and Level3, not sure why these two are chosen as a pair. Maybe its simply becaue they tend to be colocated at the same carrier hotels? But selecting a transit provider is not as simple as saying one is better. My personaly opinion is, find the two lowest cost providers, and then you can afford to buy more bandwidth, and have two options to route customers. You also need to consider the path to where you take it. For example, Cogent remote tenant buildings likely have routers with less ram that cant handle full BGP tables, so they require creating session to two seperate BGP servers (with the second one having full routes.). But of you connect to them inb a major colo center that doesn;t exist. Similar things exist with other providers depending on where you pick up the circuit. What I like about Abovenet, is they'll map out their network for you, so you know exactly what you are buying, so true redunancy can be built into the network design. Cogent is a bit more secrative about the traffic path. XO has had some really good account reps, and I liked that. But for me, they didn't really give me anything exciting as far as price or performance, more than anyone else. It should also be noted that it could make a big difference which local colo you pick the circuit up in also. So when you are evaluating a provider you are also evaluating the venue where the circuit is in. Tom DeReggi RapidDSL & Wireless, Inc IntAirNet- Fixed Wireless Broadband ----- Original Message ----- From: "Brad Belton" <b...@belwave.com> To: <bcl...@spectraaccess.com>; "'WISPA General List'" <wireless@wispa.org> Sent: Wednesday, October 21, 2009 3:47 PM Subject: Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams Cogent can be ok, but they are not equal to AboveNET, XO, AT&T, Level3 etc... We have multiple upstream GigE feeds and Cogent is one of them. It took us months to get Cogent to resolve a flapping switch or router within their network. After a couple dozen screenshots and trace routes from various looking glass sites they finally conceded. Granted the outages were only between 5 and 60 seconds long when they occurred and rarely were long enough to break BGP sessions, but they were hell on VoIP! It took us less than a day to find the specific Cogent IP or device where the problem was occurring, but months before Cogent acted on the information we provided them. Cogent Support honestly wasn't that bad, but said their hands were tied until management further up the chain completed their investigation. During that time we had to route voice traffic around Cogent as best we could. Cogent is great as a cheap third or fourth GigE upstream, but never a sole or primary Internet feed, IMO. While Cogent goes about their BGP peering a little different than most, I do agree their BGP Support is equal to anyone else's we've worked with. Best, Brad -----Original Message----- From: wireless-boun...@wispa.org [mailto:wireless-boun...@wispa.org] On Behalf Of Bret Clark Sent: Wednesday, October 21, 2009 1:15 PM To: WISPA General List Subject: Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams I always hear about Cogent having a bad rap, but where does that come from? I can't say that one bit! They've worked great for us and during the initial install clearly went above and beyond the call of duty when we encountered a problem even waking a VP up at 1AM on a Sunday morning because we need to have the circuit up and running by first thing Monday! When I have add to call their tech support up about questions that actually understand what BGP is and how it works! Bret On Wed, 2009-10-21 at 11:58 -0500, Jon Auer wrote: Cogent has a bad rap but they have been solid for us for the past year. Prior to that they had a few hickups. Their peering is pretty good. Low latency to all major content sites. Level3 seems to have more outages than a provider of their reputation should. Savvis is has poor peering from what I hear. I'd like to add Abovenet or Global crossing to my mix. On 10/21/09, Marco Coelho <coelh...@gmail.com> wrote: I'm a GigE circuit to the mix, and I've got a choice of: Abovenet Cogent Global Crossing Level3 Savvis I'm looking for recommendations of who the better upstream is. Marco -- Marco C. Coelho Argon Technologies Inc. POB 875 Greenville, TX 75403-0875 903-455-5036 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- WISPA Wants You! 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