[exelius]

Cogent is the bottom of the barrel transit provider. You use Cogent when you have a lot of bits to push and don't particularly care if they're going to get there (seriously, Cogent has like 25% packet loss at peak times.) Most companies use Cogent for overflow; i.e. they purchase enough transit through other providers for 80-90% of peak load, then fill out the rest with Cogent. It's not that Cogent is a terrible company or anything; they just provide an inferior product at an appropriate price point. Cogent wasn't interested in paying Comcast for better service because quality of service is not the product that Cogent provides. Their business model is to take advantage of their free peering status to sell unreliable transit at rock-bottom prices. Again; it's not evil or anything, but when you use Cogent that has to be what you expect.

But Netflix was using them for almost 100% of their traffic delivery. That's insane. There are other transit providers they could have paid more to and gotten better service, but that would have meant higher costs.

The whole irony of this situation is that I've heard rumors that Netflix is paying less per gigabit to Comcast than they paid Cogent while getting better service than they would get from a top-tier provider. If that's true, other companies will be lining up to get a similar deal because they'd just be cutting out the middlemen.