Cogent, Verizon and Comcast - Get your damn act together now for the sake of users!
Cogent is a brilliant disruptive force in the networking industry - they aim to have the best pricing around, and aim constantly to make better offers for their customers, hence their network has grown really fast.
Verizon and Comcast are the big bad telcos in the states who want to control everything. They all have a peering agreement between each other.
Thing is, Cogent has a lot of customers who use tons of bandwidth as their Mbps rates are generally the lowest. In today's market as low as around 0,45€/Mbps! (4500€ for 10Gig link)
Hence, Cogent is the choice for parties who move a lot of data, such as Netflix.
Verizon and Comcast are telcos, they have their network extending for the last mile and they too have vast backbone networks to connect all the metropolitan areas together, all the counties and states.
Cogent doesn't offer connections to the end user, they focus on datacenters, backbone networking, connecting different datacenters, networks and telcos together.
For more than a year Verizon and Comcast has been refusing to upgrade the peering with Cogent because they are such a disruptive force and moves so much traffic, Cogent gets the big data customers which Verizon and Comcast are unable to reach.
Verizon and Comcast have the eyeballs, Cogent have the providers, until lately Cogent has been starting to get the eyeballs as well from other countries smaller telcos getting their transit agreement.
We cannot know what precisely is going behind the curtains, but my bet is that Verizon and Comcast would like to charge Cogent for access to their eyeballs, and hence refusing to upgrade the peering.
On grassroots levels it's also been suspected that Verizon and Comcast throttle traffic from various Cogent sources, and some of it has been on the news, comcast refusing to upgrade to fix congestion to force netflix into interconnection deal.
At the end of the day, it's all users who need traffic between verizon and cogent, or comcast and cogent who suffers. My guess is that the traffic is mostly one sided, most traffic flows from cogent network to verizon and comcast, since that is the nature.
Cogent has a vastly "upstream" biased network, while Comcast and Verizon offering the last mile has vastly "downstream" biased network - or so i would assume.
However, Cogent is scoring more and more local ISPs in other countries than the states - so we might see that change eventually.
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