Review by cybah 
UPDATED: 1.4 years ago
member for 8.8 years, 57 visits, last login: 1.3 years ago
 Cambridge,Middlesex,MA
 $1000 per month
 about 7 days
 "Very Fast, Excellent Install, Quick Install Turn Around"
 "None so far except media converter is touchy"
 "Excellent Price, Excellent Speeds"
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Install Co-ordination:
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Before I write a review for cogent.. I need to briefly talk about the saga of ISPs and LEC problems we've had and what a breath of fresh air Cogent has been.
I've been with my company for 3 years, and we've had a few different ISPs.
Our first ISP was ourselves, which was a point to point to our data center. Lagged at best is what I referred to this connection. I never understood why it was so damn slow but it was slow. But due to security restrictions that were placed on us by our credit card processor, this was no longer a feasible option, so we had this disconnected.
After shopping around for a few ISPs, we decided to get a T1 from AT&T/ACC Business Services. Overall we've been happy. I do think their customer service could be a bit better, and when there was a problem it took an act of god to get it repaired. This was more to do with the LEC (Verizon) in our area, and really not AT&T's fault.
As my company began to grow, we moved to a new location. This is where our major problems started. Since the new office was located in a building that was modernized from a factory in the 1980s, had miles and miles of phone cable through out the building, and the entrance point in the building (the phone room) was a wire mess. It just appeared that every time a new tenant moved into our building, the LEC (Verizon) decided they would disconnect our T1. This has happened 5 times in the 2 years we've been in the building, and it took ALOT to get it repaired each time. But AT&T was able to get us working again.
When we moved into our building, I also ordered a DSL line from Speakeasy as a backup connection. But as our company grew, we required more and more bandwidth to administrate our application. Our DSL line became our primary internet source, as the T1 just could not handle the traffic we were giving it, and overall was faster than our T1.
As reviewers on the Speakeasy forum have said, it was installed, worked, and supported as advertised. As I have no problems with their service or support at all. It was very good! But I had another issue with speakeasy.
We grew as a company a lot, and as said before we made this our primary connection. We were directing a lot of traffic over this DSL line, and apparently Speakeasy was starting to notice. About every few weeks, I receive a phone call from the Speakeasy NOC stating that we must be have a virus or a P2P application running. This is impossible, as we run a packet inspection firewall and block most applications like this.
In very short, speakeasy threatened to cut us off! They claimed we were transferring over 10GB of traffic every week! Yeah, I don't doubt that at all, when you have 120 users connected to this connection. But they started to get nasty about it and said that they would shut of off. I was able to keep them at bay and say that we were ordering new internet service from other providers (and at the time we were) and we were just waiting for the LEC (Verizon) to get their act together to get it installed.
Speakeasy's other claim was that since we were using so much bandwidth, that they were experiencing problems in their POP and we were knocking their T1 customers off line. Now this is not my problem. I am using the connection as advertised (we have a "business" package). And if Speakeasy did not run QoS on their network to prioritize packets coming from the T1's over the DSL line, this was not my problem.
As I said before, we did order internet service from other companies. Since we were overall happy with our AT&T Service, we ordered a bonded T1 service from them for a total of 4 T1s bonded into a 6.0MB connection. But since we experienced months of delays from the LEC (Verizon), after 4 months we STILL did not have service... then one fine day something happened...
In May I received a cold call from a sales person from Cogent trying to sell me Metro Ethernet service. I just wouldn't hear it since we were already in contract with AT&T for the new service. So I disregarded the call.
Early July, I received a memo passed on to me by my Operations guy from the management company that runs our building that said our building was now a "OnNet" Building from Cogent, and we could get up to 1 Gig fibre optic service to our floor. I got very excited about this since we've had so many LEC (Verizon) Problems in our building with wiring, having Fibre Optic service directly to my server room bypassing Verizon all together would solve a lot of our problems.
I was able to weasel out of our bonded T1 contract with AT&T since they did not meet their SLA for install times (their SLA is about 90 days). I promptly ordered the Cogent Fibre Optic service.
Now onto the review of Cogent...
Installation - I ordered the service on 7/19/07, which is when I faxed over the order form to my Cogent rep. The sales rep said the SLA states that it will take 17 days to get service installed on an "OnNet" building. However, he said in our area, it could take as little as 8 days to get the service turned up. I was absolutely floored at the short lead time on this, considering the lead times we had received from other T1 providers. However the longer lead times from T1 providers is due to coordination from the LEC (Verizon). But my sales rep assured me, since Cogent owns the network and would be doing the installation themselves, we would not have such a long lead time.
The next day (7/20/07) after I ordered the service, I received a phone call from a Project Manager at Cogent introducing herself as the call point for installation. And she sent over documents for IP allocation for us to fill out. She stated that within the next 48 hours I would receive a call from a site install technician to do a walk through for installation.
On Tuesday 7/24/07 I received a call from that onsite install technician to schedule the walk through. He was happy to schedule it for the next day.
On Wednesday 7/25/07 onsite install technician was promptly at our office at the desired time to do the walk though. He stated that he would be here the next day to run the fibre from their point in the basement to our office.
The install person was very nice, and showed me their POP in the basement of the building. And yes, when Cogent advertises it as "Fibre Optic Internet", they mean it! They have a rack in our basement with passive fibre equipment. It didn't look like much (mostly because they had no customers in our building yet, as we would be the first one!) But it looked impressive.
On Thursday 7/26/07, at 8:30a sharp, a team of 6 guys was at my office to pull fibre! The guys were great. They actually looked like they wanted to be there to help us, unlike the typical Verizon technician who looks pretty disgruntled. About 6 hours later, I had a fibre cam installed in my server room with my media converter. And by 3pm, my new Fibre Optic Service was installed and active.
I received a phone call around 3:30 from the Project Manager at Cogent to tell me the service was active and we could start using it a day earlier! They originally had planned to turn up the service on Friday, but turned it up as soon as the install technicians were done.
Service Quality - Its hasn’t been more than 24 hours yet, but so far so good! After it was installed I hooked up one computer to test it out. I was getting about 40/40 speed tests on it (see below about why it’s not the full 100/100 speed we ordered). Web sites load nice and fast, and the ping times on their network are great! I am getting "1 ms" though 4 routers on their network! (I usually get around 20ms from our T1 and at home on my Comcast Cable Modem) I can tell we're on a direct fibre network.
The real test of the service will only come over time when we start migrate to the new connection and when all 120 users are using the internet at the same time. (This the current problem we have with our Speakeasy DSL and AT&T T1.. it just lags out due to over usage during the day).
I will say Cogent's SLA is great. They guarantee under 40ms ping times to anywhere in North America, as it is clearly stated in their SLA. Also in their SLA it clearly states that they reimburse you for outages in 15 minute increments. In my many years of doing Engineering, I have NEVER, EVER seen a SLA clearly state service levels like this! Cogent means Service!
Again only time will tell how good the service will be, and I will update my posting in time to report on the service.
Hardware - Since this is not a traditional service, like a T1, there's no router or "bridge". All Cogent gives you is a media converter to convert the fibre optic to ethernet. This is because most of the time, most customers do not have the facilities to have a direct fibre connect. We do to the switch this is connected to, and will probably switch to a direct fibre link to that switch in the near future.
The only issue I've noticed is the way the Media Converter 'negotiates' speed. When I did not modify my ethernet card in my computer, it would take some time for the connection to come up and "connect". I called Cogent support to ask why. They told me that they do not negotiation and always set the media converter to "100 Full Duplex" and suggested making my hardware hard set for that speed. After I did that, it takes a mere second for it to 'connect'.
Price/Value - You can't go wrong with this price. As I stated above, our (now canceled) bonded T1 service from AT&T was $1750/mo with a 2 year contract. Cogent.. Its 1000/mo flat for 100MB service. No hidden fees or taxes! There is no contract as it’s a month to month service. If I don't want their service anymore, I just call and cancel. No hoops to go through to cancel. I just simple call and say I don't want it anymore and they come remove the media converter.
The only gotcha is the $1000 installation charge. Most T1 providers waive installation charges, however Cogent can't, and I can see why. I was watching the technicians pull fibre throughout my building to get the fibre to my server room. I've done Fibre installation before at previous jobs, and frankly, $1000 bucks is pennies due to the amount of fibre that had to be run through our building to get to my server room. (Our building is oddly designed and has few direct runs to the basement!)
Customer Service - My sales rep was helpful, but not knowledgeable about the technician details of the service. He was nice to refer my technical questions to a Sales Engineer, who WAS able to answer all my questions.
The Project Manager for the install was nice, albeit a little taken off guard when I called to ask her questions.
The Installers were great. Nice guys and ready and willing to help. And willing to install the Fibre Cam anywhere I wanted to. And they re-assured me that the service would be ready by the install date.
Cogent's Telephone & Email support is so so. I've called the first day to ask why I was not getting the full 100MB speed. The agent was nice and helped me understand why (and I should have known this anyways), and I was impressed with the call. The second time I called was regarding getting reverse DNS setup. My only complaint that it took several attempts to get it setup and very long delays in getting responses via email from them to get it setup. It took them a WEEK to get it setup. I wasn't all that impressed with that. But then again, DNS requests may go to a different department than regular customer service (as I was told to email my request).
The Bottom Line - Overall I am happy so far! I HIGHLY recommend their service if you can get their "OnNet" service. I assume that people who order their Metro Ethernet and "Traditional" T1 service will have similar comments about their installation and setup.
I will keep everyone here abreast on their service as time goes on. But if you are in a building that can get their "OnNet" Fibre service. Don't hesitate.. CALL NOW and order! You won't be disappointed!
PS - If anyone is curious to know why, since Verizon is our LEC that we did not opt for FiOS from Verizon. It’s not available in our area. Which is surprising considering the Central Office we're out of (We're in the technology hub of Massachusetts!). I was told by a Verizon Technician that FiOS would not be available in our building until 2010!!!!
------- Update 8/4 -------
We've had the service over a week now. We've placed it behind our firewall and on a switch.
We had a few problems with the switch that we installed outside our firewall. It appears that this switch was bad and was creating bad CRC errors. I believe that it was sending so many bad CRC errors that it was doing SOMETHING to the media converter where the connection was just slowing down to a painful craw.
So one morning I did some testing to make sure it was not a circuit problem, by connected a laptop directly to the connection. Before I did this I was getting horrible speeds... around 700k from Microsoft. (I download XP Service Pack 2 to test speeds). After I was getting around 5MB/sec.
So just to clear CRC errors, I reconnected our firewall directly to the media converter, bypassing the now known bad switch. I also power cycled the firewall and the Media converter.
After I did that... all I have to say is WOW. I am able to download XP Service Pack 2 in about 30 seconds! I was averaging around 50MB/sec from Microsoft. This blows a T3 out of the water!
Several of us during the day, after resetting everything, hammered on the connection. According to our network graphs on the firewall, we peaked at 87MB down and 50MB up. I think the upload is slower mostly because the server we were using to test, by downloading files from it, just could not serve up the files fast enough.
Now that the connection is stable and ready to go, we're ready to roll it out to the rest of the users in our company. So late next week we really will be able to see how fast this puppy can go!
Cogent really does work as advertised!
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Cogent Communications
