Over on Todd Underwood's Renesys blog, he points out some interesting things going on with Cogent.
Some of you may know that many budget dedicated server providers use Cogent bandwidth. They often use other providers for in-bound transit but your outbound routes are over Cogent. Why is this? Savings.
Cogent has consistently provided tremendous downward pricing pressure on the IP transit market. They traditionally had a very open peering policy, which allowed traffic exchange with small and large ISPs alike.
Recently, Cogent has begun to de-peer many smaller ISPs in Europe. As Todd points out this is surprising since many of the larger European networks refuse to peer with Cogent.
So what does this mean to you? If you and your clients are based in Europe and your server is based in the facility using Cogent, you may see increased network latency since Cogent cannot take the most optimal route to your client. We are only talking milliseconds but with increased video, peer 2 peer and other interactive web applications, low-latency routes will be important.
Also, when ISPs have to take less optimal routes the number of hops or points that the data has to pass through typically increases. At every hop, there is an increased chance for network problems.
We will have to stay tuned to see how this plays out as Cogent's strategy unfolds.
