Cogent, Lumen & Global ISP Networks: A Customer's Perspective

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I asked because if we focus on Cogent for a moment, their vision is to take the Sprint network, which was basically unconnected from the world, and connect it to all the 800 Cogent carrier-neutral data centers they're connected to in North America, and architect it in such a way that they can rapidly provision waves within two weeks through long haul connectivity and metro rings dedicated just to the wavelength facilities. What's interesting about what they've done, and the way they've messaged things - which they've gotten wrong - was that the process takes a while, especially the re-architecting and connecting Sprint to Cogent, rebuilding the rings, and separating out the multi-tenant office buildings from the data centers, and doing basically two different sets of rings for each metro area, which is where the bulk of the work is today.

They've been focused on that and not as focused on lighting up waves one by one before the foundational work is done. Their hypothesis was that if you look at the top 50 to 150 out of the 800, a lot of the traffic would be flowing between those 50. They thought that if that were true, they would generate $100 million of run rate wavelength revenue. However, that hypothesis wasn't true, at least as they could tell. I kind of want to get your response to this. They basically said a lot of the routes, point A or point Z, is within that 50 to 100, but not both point A and Z. They basically have too diverse of a route map or heat map to get to that level of revenue with just 50 to 100 data centers that they do business out of.

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