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100Mbps Internet Access For $1000 Per Month
A reader writes "Cogent, a startup ISP that has just recently completed their fiber optic network across the US, is now offering 100Mbps internet access for $1000 a month in some major metropolitan areas." A few caveats of course - I'm not sure how close to actually connecting people they are - but it does sound like a nice deal.
Yeah, here in Austin I have connectivity through Time-Warner (same network as @Home? not sure). Reading their terms of service ("no servers, you naughty little linux hacker") and looking at their bandwidth profile (15Kbps up, capped) leaves one with the distinct impression that they really aren't interested in being a 2-way IP(internet protocol)-carrier but rather a 1-way content provider.
I expect that this is common to other ISPs operated by cable companies, becuase their entire business mindset (up until recently) has been focused on being the sole source of information to passively absorbing masses of people (TV). Not too suprising that they'd approach the new medium of the Internet (new to them) with the same thought patterns of the old.
On an Austin-TW side-minirant, the main reason they give against home serving and for the bandwidth cap is that "they don't have enough bandwidth". Oh, I see, you have enough bandwidth for 60+ digital cable channels but not enough to let people upload files to work at more than a snail's pace? :-/ The other rational they give is that people only want to use servers for piracy (mp3, warez). How like a content company to assume all their customers are IP (int. prop.) criminals... :-(
(Side note: I'm not trying to be condescending by defining IP twice, I just didn't want their to be confusion about which expansion of IP I was refering to.--
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
f you, your friend, your housemates, or anyone else you know is even remotely considering purchasing one of these for home use, there is a Big Blue Room that they should really consider visiting once and a while.
You've obviously never been part of a condo association or even thought beyond your immediate roommates.
I looked into getting cogent for my condo association. With 20 lofts in the building the cost would have translated to $50/month for shared 100Mbit -- a worse case scenerio of 10Mbit, or 10 times the DSL bandwidth I get now for that price. However, with so few people I would be getting close to 100Mbit for that price, or 100 times the bandwidth for what I'm paying.
Unfortunately, cogent is not available in my building and is not in any way targeting residential customers, and they need 7+ subscribers (@ $1000/each) for each set of equipment to be profitable, so I need to find six other building willing to subscribe who are close enough to use the same Pop -- not impossible, but not trivial either.
For business its great -- we're getting lit up in January. However, for those of us lusting after such things at home we'll have to wait a couple of years, not for the price to drop (although that is always nice), but simply for the service to be available at all, at any price.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
If you take the time to look at their website:
Cogent has many distinct market advantages to enhance your real estate investment... from
this page.
This is being marketed as something to install in the apartment building you own, not really as a personal connection to the internet.
On the other hand, considering building managment, do you really want the building super to also be your sysadmin?
--Tom
Tom Geller
All ISPs are not created equal, pal. Personally, I work my ass off.
-Omarius
Hello again- As it stands, Cogent has not lit up any client sites yet. I am a "customer" of Cogent's, I have signed up four buildings for my network. Their backbone lighting party here in Chicago was late November; they are roughly a month behind schedule.
The way they are costing out there service isn't too hard to follow. They buy dark fiber in pre-wired buildings, in cities that they already have drops to their fiber ring. Everyone here is missing something about Cogent - They are NOT reselling to home users. In fact, they don't allow colocation either! If you do not have a POP in a building they are lighting, you are out.
Someone a little farther on caught on to the main point of using the Cogent service - creating an incredibly fast VPN nationwide (US). Chicago is to have one of the first buildings lit, then NY, and last I heard building 3 is in San Fran. Nothing as of yet.
Hi! This is the Sig, blatantly attached to the end of this comment.
Cogent uses (or, more precisely, plans to use) deep wave division multiplexing which does indeed lend credibility to their claims of 100 Mbps on the MAN. However, their claims of "non oversubcribed bandwidth" are patently silly. Even on a 2 gbps peering point they could only serve 20 customers and the number of gigabit peers (or Internet backbones) is still pretty small. Also, the wholesale price of bandwidth for non tier-1 ISPs (they aren't a tier 1) is between $200 and $500 per meg depending on volume. They are not sending you $20,000 - $50,000 in bandwidth for $1000 a month. Sorry. World doesn't work like that.
Also, they are an in-buidling provider of the same type as Allied Riser (ticker: ARCC) and Cypress Communications (ticker: CYCO). Both of those companies have had 10 mbps Ethernet (10bFX, 10bT, or 10b2 believe it or not -- and you thought coax was dead...) offerings for over a year now and, if you look at the charts, can't make ends meet even with oversubscription. Cogent's proposal is even more silly.
The Cogent plan is great if your offices are all on the same MAN and most of your traffic is bound for those offices. Otherwise, you can send 100 megabits out to some peering point where it will be dropped in the congestion.
Also, I invite anyone to call Cogent and ask for a customer list. The last write up I saw of them or Yipes! had one guy with a T1 saying he'd like to buy a line from them when the service is available. It isn't.
Sorry. Didn't mean to rant, but people with claims like this discredit providers with real services (and business plans) and do a lot to confuse the public.
Technical Contact:
Network Operationc Center (NO2032-ORG) noc@COGENTCO.COM
Cogent Communications
1015 31st Street, NW Suite 330
Washington , DC 20007
US
+1 877 7COGENT Fax- +1 202 295 4217
....
GATEKEEPER.COGENTCO.COM 206.64.112.115
MONET.TITANIA.NET 209.207.60.17
.....
cogentco.com name server hydrogen.cogentco.com
cogentco.com name server gatekeeper.cogentco.com
cogentco.com name server monet.titania.net
cogentco.com name server sesamestreet.cogentco.com
sesamestreet.cogentco.com has address 10.0.6.1
lithium.cogentco.com has address 192.168.168.170
carbon.cogentco.com has address 192.168.168.173
helium.cogentco.com has address 192.168.168.169
hydrogen.cogentco.com has address 192.168.168.168
sodium.cogentco.com has address 192.168.168.178
almandine.cogentco.com has address 192.168.168.9
allemontite.cogentco.com has address 192.168.168.8
beryllium.cogentco.com has address 192.168.168.171
oracle.cogentco.com has address 192.168.168.193
aluminite.cogentco.com has address 192.168.168.11
nitrogen.cogentco.com has address 192.168.168.174
gatekeeper.cogentco.com has address 206.64.112.115
vjklein.cogentco.com has address 192.168.168.129
oxygen.cogentco.com has address 192.168.168.175
.......
Hooray for the Network Operationc Center!
Hooray for Highly skilled network chemists!
Hooray for non-routable RFC 1918 address space!
Top notch operation. I'm investing, and retiring at 25.
However, the problem came when we tried to access any resource outside @Home's wires. In Connecticut, they hadn't installed enough connectivity to serve the number of users that they'd signed up. Another fellow started the CT@Home Users' Group, and we squeaked until the grease came in the form of another T3.
The upload cap isn't to preserve capacity. It's to make it unusable for commercial purposes. @Home techs told me many times that people were using the service to host their little website business or ISP. So, instead of kicking them off and losing their revenue, they just put a cap in place. The people who weren't "abusing" it weren't supposed to notice. (Too bad if they did.)
There is so much bandwidth available in a modern cable plant it's not funny. My current provider (Comcast in South Carolina) would absolutely love to make paying use of all their capacity, but there's these damn people that insist on not signing up for this wonderful digital-cable thing. The cretins. That means they have to double up on a lot of TV channels, when each channel is actually capable of over 60 MBit/second.
Yes, cheap cablemodems will likely have issues. A good device (like a Cisco) will handle it just fine, you get what you pay for. I just want @Home to actually deliver the service they teased us with -- @Home Pro:
- Host your own domain!
- Servers are okay!
- REALLY! It's not vapor! (Yeah, right.)
The original point of all this was to say "Peer with Cogent, plug into their fiber, and solve the capacity issues." There's enough capacity there to make a 1 MBit cap feasible. Heck, I'd spring for a Cogent connection myself -- and damn the cablemodem!"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
"I've also read that there's some third party freeware Windows drivers that work a heck of a lot better as well"
;) It's not a kernel solution, but it can easily act as a router for a 1mbs connection on a 486.
Like RASPPPOE? It's free. It's small. It integrates nicely with Windows.
Roaring Penguin is the best PPPoE client I've used, and it's a UNIX (Linux, *BSD, etc) client. The author subscribes to the same ISP as me
Personally, I bought myself a Netgear RT314 router. I don't worry about PPPoE anymore.
This was posted before by timmy. Article here.
I always thought that college was a place that sold 100Mbps internet access for $1000 a month... And it came with free live-motion chicks viewable through the window panel on my wall. I don't know if they were real though; never went outside my room. Of course I am of that select population that would, when given the option of a date and a LAN party, pick the latter. And if there are girls at the LAN party, it counts as a date, right?
"Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."
-E. W. Dijkstra
http://www.ieng.com/warp/public/146/pressroom/2000 /mar00/sp_030600.htm l ? ID=2510
http://www.jvp.co.il/investments/optical_port.htm
http://company.monster.co.uk/cocouk/
http://www.individualinvestor.com/tbd/article.asp
--- And there it is. ---
Hi!
What Cogent is doing is part of a small but growing phenomenon--commonly called "metropolitan area networking." The basic idea is to wire a densely-populated area like a campus network--connecting to the larger Internet through a few gateways just like a university or corporate network would. The benefits of doing this are reasonably obvious: wiring an entire "campus" at once represents a single construction project, rather than becoming a years-long incremental installation of line after line after line. Typically the network service is provided with an Ethernet switch rather than a router--the host "Ethernet service provider" typically will also offer network management services for network participants.
Another emerging provider of MANs is 3rd Wire, which is presently in discussions to wire the downtown "Digital District" in Allentown, Pennsylvania. 3rd Wire is publicly indicating that they expect bandwidth costs to drop dramatically over the next 5 years--they expect to provide bandwidth within the Allentown Digital District at approximately $400/GB within a year, and their business model projects that price to drop to roughly $50/GB of bandwidth in five years.
Mind blowing? What they're doing--and they are by no means the only people doing this--is seeing that there is critical mass in providing fiber in that "last mile" to the end user. And they're being helped, in part, by communities that recognize that "urban infrastructure" in the 21st century will require bandwidth just as much as it requires paved roads and traffic signals. Those communities are actively working to bring in providers to wire their communities--reasoning (entirely correctly) that high-tech firms are going to gravitate to cities with gigabit bandwidth for sub-K bucks.
Incidentally, several posters have mentioned that this is meant "for business only"--not so. Certainly the Allentown Digital District very much wants to use the metropolitan area network to revitalize business in downtown Allentown--but we also want to encourage urban redevelopment in the surrounding neighborhoods with the offer of dramatic bandwidth for small dollars. If you can live and work a couple of blocks apart, and have gigibit Ethernet at home and at work, wouldn't that be attractive? We think it will be.
Full disclosure: I'm heavily involved with the Lehigh Valley Partnership and the Allentown Digital District.