Cogent Communications
More info
- Creator
- Dave Schaeffer
- Released
- 1999
- Type
- Internet carrier
The discount carrier of the internet backbone, best known for picking peering fights with more or less everyone.
Dave Schaeffer founded Cogent in Washington, D.C. in 1999 and built the network cheaply by buying up the wreckage of the dot-com crash, including the US assets of PSINet in 2002. The business model was IP transit at prices rivals considered predatory, and Cogent now counts as a Tier 1 network.
Cheap traffic in bulk makes other carriers keener to bill than to swap it for free. In 2005 Level 3 cut the link, leaving chunks of the internet unable to reach each other for days. The IPv6 split with Hurricane Electric has persisted since 2009; HE once sent a cake as a peace offering. In 2023 Cogent bought Sprint's wireline network for one dollar.