On 5/18/24 06:04, Jon Lewis wrote:
Cogent has been trying to establish themselves as a "tier 1" carrier
in markets outside their home turf, and Asia is one of the markets in
which the established operators are doing their best to keep Cogent out.
Back when I was helping to run a global anycast CDN, Cogent was one of
our transits [in US and EU POPs]. I identified a bunch of sub-optimal
service to networks in Asia who were silly/cheap enough to buy transit
from Cogent. Since none of the established players would peer
in-market with Cogent, and since we didn't have Cogent transit in any
of our Asian POPs (why would we?), anycast request traffic from those
Cogent customers would cross the Pacific and land in California rather
than hit a nearby POP with NTT, Tata, Singtel, etc. transits.
I suspect Cogent has either reached what they consider to be customer
critical mass in Asia, or is tired of their Asian customers
complaining about latency (since traffic to any other in-market
non-Cogent connected network routes via the US or EU) and has decided
it's time to play peering chicken to force Tata to peer with them in
Asia. Why shouldn't they? The only reason Tata, NTT, etc. won't peer
with Cogent in-market is because they don't want Cogent to be able to
compete with them in their home market.
They have a similar problem in Africa with the major African IP Transit
providers; and they are far less deployed in Africa than they are in Asia.
Mark.
