Domain: cogentco.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to cogentco.com.
Comments · 54
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Re:Why?
I am fascinated by your delusional world where every ISP serves every geographic location.
Did you even research who they are? LOL An ISP that serves every geographic location.. They won't discriminate against your money. Or are you on slashdot and actually think there is only a single or two ISP's to choose from? hahaha. hahahahaha.
That's why the rest of your post is bullshit. Someone needs to pay the cost and you don't want to pay it. You are blind that someone is paying for the exponential growth and regardless of who pays for it the costs WILL be passed on to you. Whether it's via consilidated content providers because they go bankrupt, or via ISPs because they are forced via regulation. The consumer has shit to say in this argument and will be spending more money.
Damn, it takes real balls to be this fundamentally stupid and still try to act like you have a clue about what you're talking about. Congrats on really highlighting your incompetence.
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Re:Why?
I am fascinated by your delusional world where every ISP serves every geographic location.
Did you even research who they are? LOL An ISP that serves every geographic location.. They won't discriminate against your money. Or are you on slashdot and actually think there is only a single or two ISP's to choose from? hahaha. hahahahaha.
That's why the rest of your post is bullshit. Someone needs to pay the cost and you don't want to pay it. You are blind that someone is paying for the exponential growth and regardless of who pays for it the costs WILL be passed on to you. Whether it's via consilidated content providers because they go bankrupt, or via ISPs because they are forced via regulation. The consumer has shit to say in this argument and will be spending more money.
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Re: Facebook is creepy and needs to be stopped
Stop using subsidized internet.
I literally own my fiber to the house and then I use dark fiber loops to peer into a tier-1 exchange.
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White Elephant "gift"
And when the "problem" can be described as "network provider asks a commercial data source to help pay for upgrading the network connection that the commercial data source is filling up at a profit for the commercial data source", it's not going to be considered a problem this law would help instead of hinder, by many people.
Cogent was willing to pay for the entire hardware cost to upgrade major last mile ISPs' connections to Cogent. The ISPs refused to take Cogent's money, instead demanding rents on top of that.
The word you were searching for is "maintenance costs", not "rent".
Do you know the history of white elephant gifting? http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_elephant
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Cogent offered to pay capital costs
And when the "problem" can be described as "network provider asks a commercial data source to help pay for upgrading the network connection that the commercial data source is filling up at a profit for the commercial data source", it's not going to be considered a problem this law would help instead of hinder, by many people.
Cogent was willing to pay for the entire hardware cost to upgrade major last mile ISPs' connections to Cogent. The ISPs refused to take Cogent's money, instead demanding rents on top of that.
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ISPs don't want to take Cogent's money
In the highest profile case, Cogent has offered to cover the capital costs of the needed upgrade. The problem is that last-mile ISPs are trying to collect ongoing monopoly rents by charging transit to backbone providers well in excess of the ISP's actual cost of moving the bits, when the ISP's customers are already paying their part of the cost of moving the bits.
So how would one go about taking away home ISPs' ability to get away with charging both sides of the connection?
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Cogent offered to pay
Cogent has offered to pay all the one-time costs to connect with certain large ISPs, such as the cost of a router port. The ISPs rejected this deal because they want a recurring fee for some purported expense that I still haven't been able to get anyone to explain.
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Re:How is this not a neutrality issue?
Who pays to upgrade that connection is a business decision
Cogent offered half a year ago to pay the actual costs of the upgrade. The ISPs in question appear to want to extract a markup on top of that.
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Cogent is willing to pay these costs
Since when were fibre cables, $20000 optics, Switch ports, and 40-Gigabit port licenses free when the link is turned off?
Not free, but Cogent is willing to pay these costs itself. Verizon and Comcast won't take Cogent's offer; they want to charge Cogent an arguably excessive markup on top of Cogent's costs
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If you want a baseline
Call up Cogent Communications. Ask them where the nearest carrier-neutral data centre is where they could give you a 100Mb transit connection and some simple IPv4 service (some small amount of PA space and a gateway), and how much it would cost you to use it all. That's roughly 25TB traffic, and about the smallest sensible amount of "wholesale" bandwidth you can purchase. Cogent are going to be quite cheap, and you'll be able to use the whole pipe. I'd imagine it'd be in the order of $500-1000 per month, so around 2-4c per gigabyte?
Then call that data centre and ask how for much they could co-locate a cheap 2U box (or if they have a customer who would rent you a small amount of rack space). Ask how much a cable run to Cogent would be.
Add it all up, and that's about as cheap as you can get it, at least starting from scratch. Even if you don't do this yet, you'll know how much other hosting companies are marking up what they sell. For comparison call Level3 for some "quality" bandwidth (you might need to ask for a reseller if you "only" want 100Mb). Or see how you feel about the costs of a second connection, BGP, ARIN membership and all that madness. You'll soon be your own ISP
:-) -
Re:Just wave that magic wand
Define reasonable.
Cogent used to provide gigabit connectivity for around $10,000us/month. I haven't priced them lately though. -
Data Map
Vegas has **huge** internet-tubes. Hoover dam huge. http://www.cogentco.com/img/other/networkmap_large.jpg I would assume there are other carriers going through Vegas too.
No meaningful earthquake threat out there. Sure, you'll get the occasional roller from Cali, but that's it. The weather isn't a big issue either. The data center's going to go up in smoke if the cooling quit regardless of where the data center is located.
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Re:fairness
No, you don't. A dedicated 10 Mbps link would run thousands of dollars a month (a T1, which is 1.5 each way, is ~$300 in the US)
Really? Cogent claims $4 per megabit.
http://www.cogentco.com/us/contact_sales.php
Now Cogent has many other issues, but that is a different story.
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Re:Ah... that explains it
I believe Comcast gets their connectivity from Level3 or AT&T, depending on the area, but any path going through a cogent-sprint peer at some point would be affected, though that would pretty much be a "nothing we can do about it" problem as far as Comcast goes.
Try running traceroute (tracert in windows) and see where things are going, or maybe try Cogent's looking glass to find out if you're hitting in this.
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Amazing.
Here at work we have Sprint T1s, and sure enough, http://www.cogentco.com/ (among other things) isn't working. [Traceroute to the IP shows that it gets to the first Sprint router and then dies.]
SSH into my home box and try there (I have Comcast), and it works fine.
We'll have to look at our SLA to find out what we can do (this is UNACCEPTABLE. Period.)
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Looking glasses
If you are having trouble with internet connectivity and suspect this is the issue you can :
Use traceroute if you can or
Go to the various looking glasses to see if you can get to your site (or the other site) from Sprint, Cogent, or an intermediate point.
The Sprint looking glass.
The Traceroute.org list.
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Re:How is this affecting others?
Do a traceroute, see where the path is going and where it gets dropped. On a Unix or Mac CLI, that's just
traceroute
Or, if Comcast blocks this, go to a looking glass. Here is the
Cogent Looking glass, so you can trace backwards. -
Re:Sonera moved their email servers because of thiDid you actually RTFA you are referencing to?
Telia-Sonera did not block webtraffic Cogent Communications did!
FTFA:Cogent has decided not to exchange traffic directly with TeliaSonera's AS 1299 or indirectly with AS 1299 through a third-party provider. As a result, Cogent has partitioned the Internet and disrupted the flow of traffic between Cogent and TeliaSonera customers. While this has a negative impact on some users of the Internet, this effect is the result of Cogent's decision and is unfortunately beyond TeliaSonera's control. Until Cogent rectifies this situation, TeliaSonera customers experiencing any difficulty reaching Cogent's network can continue to purchase IP Transit from TeliaSonera along with another Tier 1 provider. This will fix the immediate problem and ensure optimal connectivity going forward. We sincerely apologise for the inconvenience caused⦠If you have further concerns, please address your commercial contact at TeliaSonera
Care to explain to us who are not wearing tinfiol hats how this can be interpreted as TeliaSonera willfully blocking traffic to Open Standards sites? -
Re:More alarmist bullshit
They said the same thing about the railroads too at one point.
The railroads had customers as soon as the second station was built. Are you going to subscribe to NuInternet, now available in Chicago with access to all of the websites in Kansas City? They might be able to find a handful wanting a WAN between offices, but we've already got services that do that over leased lines, if not the current internet backbone itself.
How many trillions have been spent on motor vehicles and all the infrastructure to support them, worldwide?
And how many trillions of that was spent by governments, like the millions thrown at the telcos to develop fiber infrastructure that ended up just funding stock buyouts and mergers? -
Unfortunately, the playing field is not levelThere is such an abundance of crappy customer service out there you would think that any company that provides outstanding (or even reasonable) customer service could steal the market. I'm not trying to sell these services or anything, but there are alternatives (for some people), and their customer service is outstanding. I have lots of personal experience with both Speakeasy and Cogent. In both cases, they contact me when there's a problem. Both services give me "heads up" notifications when service on their end might affect me, and they rarely make you wait on the telephone. The only time I've ever waited was while a Speakeasy customer service person put me on hold while he put together a conference call between Covad and Verizon techs (I was trying to have a local loop installed, but Verizon kept botching the thing up).
There is a downside: both are expensive. Not so much for Cogent (well, I'm not paying for that one anyway, work is), but Speakeasy definitely comes at a premium. For the price of my one Speakeasy connection, I could buy one of these "triple-play" packages from one of their competitors. And if my cell service weren't also paid for by my work (I always have to be reachable for work), I would consider it. But in the end, I don't think I would-- it's just not worth it. The last time I lost service, on Christmas eve, I called Speakeasy, and sure enough, someone was there and responded. They tracked it back to the DSLAM (Verizon's DSLAM), and we ended up concluding that getting it fixed was a lost cause until the holiday was over. Sure enough, two days after Christmas, my service was back-- probably whenever the Verizon tech responsible got off his fat arse.
But anyway-- we all know why the "good guys" can't compete. It's because the big telcos have politicians deeply within their pockets. How is Speakeasy going to be cheaper when they have to lease their lines from Verizon for more than Verizon itself charges for the same service? This is why we shelled out billions to the telcos in the 1990's-- they're common carriers. We didn't give them that money to expand their private networks. We gave it to them to expand the national infrastructure. As far as I'm concerned, they're reneging on their contractual obligations to us. And I will not give them a penny if I can help it. -
Re:But what are their terms of service?
My company has been affected by this pretty signicantly, although our regional ISP (reynwood.com) has done a fair amount to set up alternate routes for us since Level3 started blackholing PSI.net/Cogent netblocks. The problem is not that Level3 and Cogent depeered, but that Level3 routers were blackholing the Cogent netblocks by returning ICMP host unreachable messages. Once Level3 decided to turn off their direct connection with Cogent, then they should have chosen to route the traffic via one of their other peers as an intermediate, not claimed that all of Cogent's network was unreachable.
Here's a bunch of traceroutes to some of my Usenet peers showing exactly what was going on:
% traceroute news-in.newsgroups.com
traceroute to news-in.newsgroups.com (38.119.100.108), 64 hops max, 44 byte packets
1 polycom1.codefab.com (199.103.21.254) 0.947 ms 0.787 ms 0.874 ms
2 199.103.21.9 (199.103.21.9) 3.011 ms 3.378 ms 3.225 ms
3 sw1.32a.nyc.reynwood.com (199.103.19.125) 3.560 ms 4.381 ms 4.361 ms
4 ge-8-1-241.core1.NewYork1.Level3.net (4.78.160.45) 3.960 ms !H * 4.476 ms
!H
% traceroute news-in.spamkiller.net
traceroute to news-in.spamkiller.net (38.119.71.4), 64 hops max, 44 byte packets
1 polycom1.codefab.com (199.103.21.254) 0.946 ms 0.771 ms 0.859 ms
2 199.103.21.9 (199.103.21.9) 3.081 ms 3.457 ms 3.312 ms
3 sw1.32a.nyc.reynwood.com (199.103.19.125) 3.896 ms 5.366 ms 4.283 ms
4 ge-8-1-241.core1.NewYork1.Level3.net (4.78.160.45) 3.986 ms !H * 4.455 ms
!H
As an update, according to this status page here at http://status.cogentco.com/, Level3 has blinked and is restoring connectivity for now while both sides negotiate:
10/7/05 (4:20pm edt): Level 3 has restored all peers with Cogent as of 4:00pm edt. We are seeing some latency in traffic across to Level 3 as sessions re-establish, mail servers deliver messages, etc. We hope the above normal traffic volumes will decrease within the next hour.
10/7/05 (3:40pm edt): Level 3 has restored some of their peering sessions with Cogent at this time. We do not know if this is a temporary or a permanent change, and will continue to negotiate with Level 3 to resolve all the issues they have with Cogent. -
Re:The peering is back up
Maybe Level(3) responded to Cogent's press release:
"Cogent Communications Group, Inc. (AMEX: COI), a Tier 1 Internet Service provider, is requesting that Level 3 turn their side of the companies' Internet backbone peering connection back on immediately to thwart any further disruption of mutual customers' Internet service. Once traffic is being exchanged between the two networks, Cogent will discuss the peering situation with Level 3,anytime, anywhere."
http://www.cogentco.com/htdocs/press.php?func=deta il&person_id=62
Cogent's looking glass also confirms this http://www.cogentco.com/htdocs/glass.php:
trace www.level3.com
Type escape sequence to abort.
Tracing the route to www.level3.com (209.245.19.42)
1 g10-0-224.core01.lax01.atlas.cogentco.com (66.250.4.5) 0 msec 4 msec 0 msec
2 p14-0.core01.sjc01.atlas.cogentco.com (66.28.4.74) 12 msec 12 msec 12 msec
3 p4-0.core01.sfo01.atlas.cogentco.com (66.28.4.93) 16 msec 16 msec 16 msec
4 p15-0.core02.sfo01.atlas.cogentco.com (66.28.4.70) 12 msec 12 msec 16 msec
5 p10-0.core01.sjc03.atlas.cogentco.com (66.28.4.133) 16 msec 16 msec 12 msec
6 so-0-2-0.edge2.SanJose1.Level3.net (4.68.127.201) 12 msec 12 msec 12 msec
7 so-3-2-0.bbr2.SanJose1.Level3.net (4.68.121.197) 16 msec 16 msec 16 msec
etc... -
Re:The peering is back up
Maybe Level(3) responded to Cogent's press release:
"Cogent Communications Group, Inc. (AMEX: COI), a Tier 1 Internet Service provider, is requesting that Level 3 turn their side of the companies' Internet backbone peering connection back on immediately to thwart any further disruption of mutual customers' Internet service. Once traffic is being exchanged between the two networks, Cogent will discuss the peering situation with Level 3,anytime, anywhere."
http://www.cogentco.com/htdocs/press.php?func=deta il&person_id=62
Cogent's looking glass also confirms this http://www.cogentco.com/htdocs/glass.php:
trace www.level3.com
Type escape sequence to abort.
Tracing the route to www.level3.com (209.245.19.42)
1 g10-0-224.core01.lax01.atlas.cogentco.com (66.250.4.5) 0 msec 4 msec 0 msec
2 p14-0.core01.sjc01.atlas.cogentco.com (66.28.4.74) 12 msec 12 msec 12 msec
3 p4-0.core01.sfo01.atlas.cogentco.com (66.28.4.93) 16 msec 16 msec 16 msec
4 p15-0.core02.sfo01.atlas.cogentco.com (66.28.4.70) 12 msec 12 msec 16 msec
5 p10-0.core01.sjc03.atlas.cogentco.com (66.28.4.133) 16 msec 16 msec 12 msec
6 so-0-2-0.edge2.SanJose1.Level3.net (4.68.127.201) 12 msec 12 msec 12 msec
7 so-3-2-0.bbr2.SanJose1.Level3.net (4.68.121.197) 16 msec 16 msec 16 msec
etc... -
Re:Illegal?
If you build the road on privately owned property, with privately purchased materials and labor, there would be no problem with you permitting or denying access according to your whims.
It should also be noted, that as of 4:20 EDT today, Level 3 has turned the peering connections to Cogent back up.
http://status.cogentco.com/ -
It's happened....What you fail to realize, is it has already happened. At this point in time, I can't access http://www.cogentco.com/ and numerous other sites. I'm coming from Time Warners NY Road Runner network. The internet, for me and 10s of thousands of others, is partioned.
That either network corporation allowed this to occur is without pardon.
What I'm afraid of, is when this is all over and people realize how singificant it was, the solution to mangers will be "buy service to each, so we never have to worry about being partioned". Which is exactly what both companies would like to see.Tracing route to cogentco.com [38.9.51.20]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 3 ms 3 ms 3 ms 192.168.4.1
2 20 ms 61 ms 14 ms 10.33.8.1
3 10 ms 14 ms 13 ms pos0-0-nycmnyb-rtr1.nyc.rr.com [24.29.97.93]
4 11 ms 11 ms 12 ms 24.29.97.25
5 9 ms 15 ms 17 ms pos2-0-nycmnya-rtr2.nyc.rr.com [24.29.101.253]
6 15 ms 15 ms 15 ms pop2-nye-P13-3.atdn.net [66.185.141.37]
7 22 ms 201 ms 222 ms bb2-nye-P1-0.atdn.net [66.185.151.66]
8 13 ms 13 ms 14 ms pop1-nye-P1-0.atdn.net [66.185.151.51]
9 17 ms 19 ms 20 ms Verio.atdn.net [66.185.139.150]
10 20 ms 12 ms 13 ms p16-0-1-3.r21.nycmny01.us.bb.verio.net [129.250.3.48]
11 25 ms 26 ms 25 ms p16-1-2-2.r21.asbnva01.us.bb.verio.net [129.250.4.27]
12 * * * Request timed out. -
Re:Consider switching to someone less petulant
A big block of IP addresses does not a major ISP make.
Perhaps not on its surface, though this really has nothing to do with blocks reserved per se--especially for other uses like HAM readio. It's about IP block size and what's being done with the IP block.
In this case Cogent has:1) the entire
as Cogent does, you're surely, surely not a small ISP! /8 for its use as an ISP and a common carrier--to say nothing of:
2) THEIR OWN FIBER under the ocean
3) one of only 13 ROOT DNS servers globally (C.ROOT-SERVERS.NET is in Cogent's 192.33.4.0/24 IP space)
The point is: as most of us are non-multi-homed end users of ISPs--even major ones like Cogent--we're now all subject to the whims of *other* ISPs as to whether or not we can see customers who aren't even hosted by them?!?! Grrrr.
For instance: right now no one on Comcast, Road Runner, or Verizon can see our sites or those of our customers. How does L3 get off doing that?
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Cache of that statment?
This link http://status.cogentco.com/ isn't very helpful to those of us who are being affected. We can't see it.
Anyone have a link that will work for those of us who can't access it? -
Cogentco website problemsFor some absurd reason I cannot connect to www.cogentco.com. I have tried going to it with a web browser and pinging it, but it doesn't connect. The ping returns:
"Ping request could not find host www.cogentco.com. Please check the name and try again."
but, when I ping it from nwtools.com, it works just fine. I can connect to many other websites, but not to cogent. I am on a verizon DSL, if that makes any difference. Does anyone have any ideas as to what's going on?
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Alternative providers
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Re:I don't get it
Haven't you heard? Ever since COGENT entered the market, excess bandwidth is free.
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Cogent Communications
I've had a number of problems with a Cogent Communications customer (Glowing Edge) spamming the hell out of one of my addresses. After numerous complaints to Cogent (and a couple of phone calls to their abuse dept.), I determined that they really don't plan to drop this customer (despite being told by their abuse dept. that this customer generated the greatest number of complaints). I've since denied all of their netblocks (see below) from sending mail to me - I recommend others do the same. Don't support ISPs which allow their customers to spam!
Cogent Communications netblocks:
209.115.0.0/16
209.41.192.0/18
206.1 83.224.0/19
216.28.0.0/15
209.146.0.0/17
66.28. 0.0/16
66.250.0.0/16
66.132.0.0/17
207.254.144. 0/20
38.112.0.0/13 -
Re:3mbps is still better
Cogent is now running a special -- $1000/month for 100Mbps Internet access. (Yes, that's 100Mbps, as in 66 times faster than a T1.)
You can't use it solely for web hosting, as I understand, but companies who need Internet access for their work sites are signing up for this in droves. Screw cable -- I'll take 100Mbit for $1000/month any day (provided I have enough users to cover the costs.) :) -
Re:I wonder what NetGear's liability is.
When you buy in huge quantities, you can get really sweet deals. Cogent can be had for $10/Mbps, $30/Mbps if you're reselling (ISP / hosting). Granted, Cogent's "cheap" bandwidth, but a lot of reputable places can be had for $50/Mbps or so if you're buying huge quantities.
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If you think this is bad
Someone should tell these guys about it. What they advertise as "ultra high speed internet access" is actually a great 100 Mbit LAN connection...to the other residents of the apartment complex. Connection to the internet? Capped at 64 kbps. Yes, you read that right... 64 kilobits per second. As in, slightly faster than your 56K modem. On a good day.
I tried to call them on it, but the apartment won't take responsibility ("we're not the network guys, we just pay for it") and the actual ISP won't either ("we just provide what they pay us for"). It infuriates me because I think the ISP is trying to pull a fast one on the apartment complex and the complex just doesn't know any better. Even the head technician claims that 64k is two to three times faster than 56k cause it's full-duplex (doesn't help my download speed) and ethernet means reduced latency (still doesn't help my big downloads).
Someone get Cogentco to come to Utah. Now *that's* what I consider "ultra high-speed internet!" -
How much is 5GB/month?Let's see:
60*60*24*30 = 2,592,000 seconds in a month
5 GB * 8 (bits/byte) / 2.5Msecs = 16 kbps of 24x7 data.
Not enough to run a bandwidth-hungry game server, but still respectable. Certainly adequate for web, FTP, and email. (Until you're slash-dotted.)
If you want to run a game server, consider a colo. My team uses The NetGamer which shares their 100 Mbps Cogent fiber in 2 Mbps (uncapped) units for a reasonable price.
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Re:Disincentive?
The fact that services like congent communication exist means that even with shared resources, companies can make money off people while providing unlimited service (of course, the question now is whether cogent does in fact make money providing non-metered connections).
However, the cost probably adds up when you need mission critical servers requiring connections to several backbones. Now, you need to take into account several links to several service providers as well as the extra hardware, etc. I think that's the reason why brand-name colocation/hosting bandwidth is so much more expensive as compared to, say, getting a quote for a T1 to your basement. -
My Semi-Related IdeaFor the longest time, I've wanted to get a 100 Mbps Cogent line ($3,000 month if you're reselling it) and share it with my neighbors. The math actually seems to work out -- if I can get 60 people to pay me $50/month, I'll break even. (I'm not looking to make money, just a way to reduce the pain of having a 100 Mbps line...) I could use 802.11b to give them 11 Mbps (up or download), and maybe, for $100/month, use 802.11a for 54-72 Mbps. (Keep in mind that this is 'broadband' -- I'm not guaranteeing anyone that they'll be able to use the whole 72 Mbps that 'Turbo' 802.11a offers...)
I'm convinced that if Cogent ever starts providing lines in my area, I'd be able to do this without losing too much money. Has anyone tried anything of this sort?
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Re:Vote with your Dollar!!!
I work for a mid-size ISP and there is, indeed, money to be made. Depending on the size of your ISP, you might want to consider using Cogent as one of your upstream providers since they have no limit on bandwidth for circuits purchased from them.
You can buy a 100Mbps circuit for $1000/month or a 1Gbps circuit for $10,000/month with *no metering*.
Check out Cogent's FAQ here. -
little networks & bandwith co-ops
I firmly believe that if this starts to become prevalent a return to the 'BBS' days will result. Only this time instead of fidonet running over 9600bps modems. It will be apartment complexes/neighborhoods etc tied to each other over dark fiber links served to their users with high speed short distance wireless. Already where I live there are numerous apartment complexes that provide 'free internet' as part of the rent. Companies like Cogent will be more than happy to provide high bandwidth backbones between major cities.
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Re:What to do???
Cogent. They're generally regarded as craptacular, but they are indeed cheap where you can get 'em.
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Huh?
I must be missing something here. With the bandwidth prices dropping sharply in the past couple of years, how come cable companies still lose money? You can get 100 Mbps link from Cogent for $3k per month. That's 100 customers using 1 Mbps all day long for $30 per month.
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Re:Wireless Co-ops
If I lived in one of the cities serviced by Cogent. I would already be doing exactly that.
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Re:T1? Ick try cogent
20 users on a T1 will be slow. Try this though.
Cogent. 100Mbits for $1000. Much better deal. Now your 20 users will be _VERY_ happy. Only problem is that you will feel silly with 802.11 tied to a 100mbit line.
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Re:Contrary to popular belief, the Internet in't f
The one I can remember right now is Cogent although I think there are others.
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Re:If money's no object...
Two words: Cogent Communications.
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Different Provider
this may sound funny if you can't raise money at $300 dollars per megabit but ever think of using a provider like cogent you could be provisioned a 100Mbps cat5 link for $3000 per month and use all you want. Just a thought
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Re:Don't underestimate the cost of web publishing
100 GB is one spindle now days. A hotswap SCSI attached IDE raid config with a capacity of 1TB costs about $12k. Network costs? 100Mbps of internet connectivity costs 1k a month. Assuming mostly static content, the computers, network swiches and hot failover clustering software to drive this bad boy could probably be gotten for less than $30k. Pay a couple good students to set the whole thing up so it runs itself and you would be left with the cost of a couple HTML monkeys to integrate the whole mess.
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Re:Why not record videos of classes as well?Because this video streaming costs money
That's true, but in the time-scale of this project it shouldn't be a big problem. I just recently signed up for network service with cogent who is proving 100 megabits of internat based transit for $1000/mo. If you figure 256kbit mpeg4 streams (very watchable even now) that's 400 people watching video at the same time for only $12,000 a year. Dirt cheap. Cogent is part of a new breed of ISP that will be coming to market in the next few years that aggresively use DWDM to provide much more bandwidth per dollar than traditional service providers can. Bill Joy said in a recent interview that he thinks the biggest thing coming that people don't expect is an explosion of optical bandwidth. So I wouldn't be too worried about 1990's economics of video streaming.
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Cogent Communications does this
Cogent Communications provides ethernet-over-fiber to businesses in high-rise office buildings. Unfortunately the service is only availible in places where Cogent is able to hook up hundreds of customers. However, the technology is there. They give the building a very fast connection (multigigabit?) and offer customers either 100 Base-FX ethernet (100 Mb over Fiber) or 1000 Base-SC (Gigabit ethernet over SC Fiber). It's insalnely cheap, but with limited availibility. 100 Megabit connections cost $1000/month, and gigabit are $10,000/month. A T1, in comparison, costs about $1000/month (here in South Florida) and it's only 1.5 Mb.
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Please ExplainI decided to head over to Sun's site to price a few of these desktop systems out... (I have a titanium-reinforced desk. Umm... yeah, that's it.)
The base price for their low-end "midrange server" is over $40,000. It has a single SPARC processor, and 1 GB of RAM. It appears to be exactly like a $5,000 Ultra5 Workstation, but in a much bigger box. (Personal refrigerator vs. pizza box) Am I overlooking something, or is this outrageously expensive? I'd just as soon get the Ultra5 and then buy myself one of Cogent Communications' 100 Mbps Fiber lines for $1,000 a month.