Cogent Communications

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Cogent Communications Group, Inc.

Type	Public (NASDAQ: CCOI)
Founded	1999
Headquarters	Washington, D.C., USA
Key people	Dave Schaeffer Founder/President/CEO
Industry	Telecommunications
Market cap	$228 million USD^[1]
Revenue	$185.7 million USD (2007)
Operating income	▼ $29.9 million USD (2007)
Net income	▼ $31.0 million USD (2007)
Employees	431 (February, 2008)
Website	www.cogentco.com

Cogent Communications is a multinational internet service provider whose network spans more than 30,000 miles and provides service in over 100 cities across 20+ countries. Cogent carries more than 11 petabytes per day of Internet traffic and connects to approximately 2,300 networks, including 330 peer ASes. Cogent believes it has grown to become the second largest carrier of Internet traffic in the world with over 17% of the world's Internet traffic crossing its network.

Cogent's AS174 has one of the highest-ranked connectivity degrees on the Internet.^[2]^[3]

1 Network Map
2 Acquisition History
3 Peering
4 Notes
5 External links

Network Map

Acquisition History

Cogent was founded in 1999 at the peak of the industry's growth. Soon thereafter, vast market wealth was eradicated with the telecom bubble's bursting and many other ISPs were thrown into a state of turmoil. Over three brief years, Cogent completed 13 acquisitions of other failing providers. Whether it was an entire company or just select assets, Cogent was able to acquire over $14 billion of invested capital through these acquisitions which it purchased for only $60 million, including $4 billion worth of Property, Plant and Equipment.^[4] See Cogent's acquisition history below:

September 2001 - Acquires the assets of NetRail
February 2002 - Acquires Allied Riser
April 2002 - Acquires Building Access Agreements from OnSite Access
April 2002 - Acquires Major US Assets of PSINet
September 2002 - Acquires Major Assets of FiberCity Networks
February 2003 - Acquires Fiber Network Solutions
May 2003 - Acquires Assets of Applied Theory
January 2004 - Acquires LambdaNet France & Spain
March 2004 - Acquires Fiber Network and Equipment in Germany Out of Former Carrier1 Assets
August 2004 - Acquires UFO
September 2004 - Acquires Global Access
October 2004 - Acquires Aleron Broadband
December 2004 - Acquires NTT/Verio Dedicated Access Business in U.S.

Peering

Cogent has been controversial in the ISP market for pricing as low as $4 per megabit and its public disputes over peering with AOL (2003) ^[5], France Telecom (2006)^[6], Level 3 (2005)^[7], TeliaSonera (March 2008)^[8] and Sprint Nextel (October 2008)^[9]. In this last instance, Sprint has stated that no peering agreement existed with Cogent, and that they were severing connections from a failed settlement-free peering trial the previous year. Cogent was notified of the impending disconnections and Sprint has temporarily reinstated the connection to give Cogent additional time to arrange for peering.[1] Cogent states that they are a strong supporter of an open and free peering policy and that they treat all data on their network equally with the highest level of priority possible.^[10]

On March 14, 2008, after Cogent stopped routing packets from European network provider Telia (AS 1299), their two networks lost mutual connectivity. ^[8] The connection was reestablished March 28, 2008 with interconnection points in both the United States and Europe. ^[11]