Cogent 100Mbps for $1k/mo - catch?

[CTho9305]

What is the catch? There must be some reason CMU paysMANY MANY times more than that for 55Mbps of commodity bandwidth we have. I looked through the SLA didn't see any mention of usage caps. I'm not entirely sure if they serve Pittsburgh because whoever designed the site likes really small fonts

.

The only thing I can see that is bad is the 55ms latency... I pinged a bunch of sites from here and the majority are more like 20ms, sites like google are under 10ms.

Is there a catch to this offer?

 

[randal]

Yea, the catch is that the Cogent network SUCKS. They have terrible peering and use a lot of leased fiber ... one ISP in town uses it and resells it to another one, and over our multiple-DS3 connections we still ping 100+ ms.

Oh, and if you resell the line, it's 3K for the line ... and it's only available in select cities; the local ISP gets it dropped off in denver then splits off a DS3 and sends it here to colorado springs.

If you were doing a WAN and used Cogent exclusively, it'd be wicked fast, but for anything else it is not good at all.

randal

 

[cmetz]

Bring your laptop by my house and I'll give you a 100Mb/s connection to the Internet for only $10(*). It's a 100Mb/s INTERNET CONNECTION!

Of course, my upstream is a SDSL line. But what does that matter when you're getting a 100Mb/s INTERNET CONNECTION!

(*-no, not really.)