Cogent Communications Holdings, Inc. operates as a facilities-based provider of high-speed Internet access, private network services, optical wavelength and optical transport services and data center colocation space and power.
The company’s network is specifically designed and optimized to transmit packet-routed data. The company delivers its services primarily to businesses, large and small, communications service providers and other bandwidth-intensive organizations in 56 countries across No...
Cogent Communications Holdings, Inc. operates as a facilities-based provider of high-speed Internet access, private network services, optical wavelength and optical transport services and data center colocation space and power.
The company’s network is specifically designed and optimized to transmit packet-routed data. The company delivers its services primarily to businesses, large and small, communications service providers and other bandwidth-intensive organizations in 56 countries across North America, Europe, South America, Oceania and Africa.
The company offers on-net Internet access services exclusively through its own facilities, which run from its network to its customers’ premises. The company offers its on-net services to customers located in buildings that are physically connected to its network. The company’s on-net service consists of high-speed Internet access and private network services offered at speeds ranging from 100 megabits per second to 400 gigabits per second.
The company provides its on-net Internet access and private network services to its corporate, net-centric and enterprise customers. The company’s corporate customers are located in multi-tenant office buildings (MTOBs) that typically include law firms, financial services firms, advertising and marketing firms, as well as health care providers, educational institutions and other professional services businesses. The company’s net-centric customers include bandwidth-intensive users that leverage its network either to deliver content to end users or to provide access to residential or commercial Internet users. Content delivery customers include over the top media service providers, content delivery networks, web hosting companies, and commercial content and application software providers. The company’s net-centric customers include access networks consists of other internet service providers (ISP’s), telephone companies, mobile phone operators and cable television companies that collectively provide internet access to a substantial number of broadband subscribers and mobile phone subscribers across the world. These net-centric customers generally receive the company’s services in carrier neutral colocation facilities and in its own data centers. The company operates data centers throughout North America and Europe that allow its customers to collocate their equipment and access its network. Additionally, the Sprint Business customers include a number of companies larger than the company’s historical customer base. In connection with the acquisition of Sprint Communications, the company expanded selling services to these larger Enterprise customers.
In addition to providing on-net services, the company provides Internet access and private network services to customers that are not located in buildings directly connected to its network. The company provides these off-net services primarily to corporate customers using other carriers’ circuits to provide the last mile portion of the link from the customers’ premises to its network. The company also provides certain non-core services that resulted from acquisitions, including the acquisition of Sprint Communications. The company continues to support but do not actively sell these non-core services.
In connection with its acquisition of Sprint Communications, the company began to provide optical wavelength services and optical transport services over a network that is generally independent of its legacy IP network. The company is selling these wavelength services to its existing customers, customers of Sprint Communications and to new customers who require dedicated optical transport connectivity without the capital and ongoing expenses associated with owning and operating network infrastructure.
Strategy
The company intends to remain a leading provider of high-quality, high-speed Internet access and private network services. The principal elements of the company’s strategy are to grow its corporate customer base; expand its business with enterprise customers; increase its share of the net-centric market; pursue on-net customer growth; continue to improve its sales efforts and productivity; expand its off-net corporate and enterprise internet access and virtual private network (VPN) business; expand its product offerings to include wavelength - optical transport services; expand its data center footprint; and increase its leasing of IPv4 address space.
Network
The company’s network consists of in-building riser facilities, metropolitan optical networks, metropolitan traffic aggregation points and inter-city transport facilities. The company delivers a high level of technical performance because its network is optimized for packet routed traffic. The company’s network consists of 3,453 on-net buildings and it serves 264 metropolitan markets in North America, Europe South America, Oceania and Africa. Important strategic components of the company’s network include 1,871 MTOBs strategically located in commercial business districts; 1,646 CNDCs located in 1,478 buildings offering its customers the largest portfolio of CNDCs of any carrier; 104 Cogent Data Centers; 808 wave enabled CNDC’s; 55 Cogent edge data centers; 1,132 intra-city IP networks, or rings, and 203 metro wave rings, consisting of 87,678 fiber miles and 29,802 fiber route miles; an inter-city network of 79,621 terrestrial fiber route miles; and 320 high-capacity transoceanic circuits that connect the North American, European, South American, Oceanic and African portions of its network.
The company’s network consists of owned optical fiber in the Sprint Network and leased optical fiber on a long-term basis from carriers with large amounts of unused fiber to which it directly connects its own optical equipment and Internet routers to form its optical fiber national backbone. The company has expanded its network by acquiring owned and leased fiber through key acquisitions of financially distressed companies or their assets at a significant discount to their original cost.
Inter-city Network
The company’s inter-city network consists of optical fiber, including transoceanic capacity circuits for undersea portions, connecting major cities in North America, Europe, South America, Oceania and Africa. The company’s inter-city network consists of the approximately 19,000-mile inter-city portion of the Sprint Network and long-term, leased strands of optical fiber, typically two to four, out of the multiple fibers owned from various dark fiber vendors. The company installs the optical and electronic equipment necessary to amplify, regenerate, and route the optical signals along this network. The company maintains, repairs, upgrades and replaces the Sprint Network and it pays its dark fiber vendors its annual pro rata fees for these same services, often called operation and maintenance for the leased optical fiber. For both the owned and leased portions of its fiber network, the company provides its own equipment maintenance.
Intra-city Networks
In each metropolitan area in which it provides its high-speed on-net Internet access services, the company’s backbone network is connected to one or more routers that are connected to one or more of its metropolitan optical networks. The company’s intra-city networks are a combination of the 1,300 miles of owned Sprint Network and its IRU rights to use optical fiber that the company obtained from carriers with optical fiber networks in those cities. These metropolitan networks consist of optical fiber that runs from the central router in a market into routers located in its on-net buildings. The company’s metropolitan fiber runs in a ring architecture, which provides redundancy so that if the fiber is cut, data in its IP network can still be transmitted to the central router by directing traffic in the opposite direction around the ring. The router in the building provides the connection to each of the company’s on-net customers.
Within the cities where it offers its off-net Internet access services, the company leases lit circuits from telecommunications carriers, primarily local telephone companies and cable TV companies, to provide the last mile connection to its customer’s premises. Typically, these circuits are aggregated at various locations in those cities onto higher-capacity leased circuits that ultimately connect the local aggregation router to the company’s network.
Multi-Tenant Office Buildings: The company has network access to a portfolio of 1,871 MTOBs which provide it access to a highly attractive base of bandwidth intensive tenants. In MTOBs where the company provides service to multiple tenants, it connects its routers to a cable typically containing 12 to 288 optical fiber strands that run from its equipment that is generally located in the basement of the building through the building riser to the customer location. The company’s service is initiated by connecting a fiber optic cable from its customer’s local area network in its suite to the infrastructure in the building riser giving its customer dedicated and secure access to its network using an Ethernet connection.
Carrier Neutral Data Centers (CNDCs): The company’s network is collocated in and can provide connectivity to customers in 1,646 CNDCs located in 1,478 buildings across its footprint. CNDCs are an integral component of the Internet infrastructure where content providers, application service providers, carriers and corporate customers locate their server and service infrastructure. CNDCs offer highly reliable, secure, effective and convenient space for these operators to access important services, including connectivity, power, rack space and security all on a 24-hour basis in order to support their Internet activities, and after its acquisition of the Sprint Business, wavelength services. The company is connected to more CNDCs than any other IP transit provider, enabling it to offer greater coverage, more network configuration choices and increased reliability for its net-centric customers. The company operates an intra-city fiber network to CNDCs optimized for IP services and optical wavelength services in the U.S. and Mexico.
Cogent Data Centers: The company operates 104 data centers across the United States and in Europe. These facilities comprise over 1.9 million square feet of floor space with 177 MW of available power and are directly connected to its network. The company also operates 55 Cogent edge data centers. Each location is equipped with secure access, UPS, and backup generators. The company’s customers typically purchase bandwidth, rack space, and power within these facilities.
Internetworking: The Internet is an aggregation of interconnected networks. Larger ISPs exchange traffic and interconnect their networks by means of direct private connections referred to as private peering. The company interconnects with the networks of its customers, which represent the majority of its interconnections and network traffic, through the sale of its transit services. The company interconnects with 8,250 networks that pay it to exchange traffic as its customers. The company supplements its customer network interconnections with settlement-free peering to its non-customer tier one global ISPs. The company has settlement-free private peering interconnections between its network and 23 other major ISPs who are not its customers.
Tier 1 ISP Status: The company directly connects with 8,250 total networks. As a result of the size and breadth of its customer base and the extensive footprint and scale of its network, the company is a Tier 1 ISP. The company exchanges traffic with 23 other Tier 1 ISPs on a settlement free basis. The remaining networks are customers whom the company charges for Internet access. The company’s standing as a Tier 1 ISP provides it with a reputation for size, breadth and reliability.
The company is considered a Tier 1 ISP with a large customer base, and, as a result, it has settlement-free peering arrangements with other providers with which it wishes to peer. This allows the company to exchange traffic with those ISPs without payment by either party.
Network Management and Customer Care: Following its acquisition of the Sprint Communications and its subsidiaries (Sprint Business), the company’s primary network operations centers are located in Washington, D.C., Herndon, Virginia, Overland Park, Kansas and Madrid, Spain. These facilities provide continuous operational support for its network. The company’s network operations centers are designed to immediately respond to any problems in its network. The company’s customer care call centers are located in Washington, D.C., Herndon, Virginia, Atlanta, Georgia, and Madrid, Spain. To ensure the quick replacement of faulty equipment in the intra-city and long-haul networks, the company has deployed field engineers across North America and Europe. In addition, the company has maintenance contracts with third-party vendors that specialize in maintaining optical and routed networks.
Field Services: The company’s field services organization includes employees globally. The department facilitates the deployment, maintenance, and support of products or services in the company’s data centers, network points of presence (PoPs), CNDCs and MTOBs. This department is responsible for on-site activities, ranging from initial installations and configurations to troubleshooting, repairs, and upgrades. Field Services is also responsible for deployment, repair and reconfiguration of the approximately 20,800 route miles of owned fiber optic cable comprising the Sprint Network.
Customers
The company offers its services to three sets of customers: corporate customers, which primarily include small and medium-sized businesses located in North America, enterprise customers, and net-centric customers, which include, content providers, applications service providers and access networks, consist of ISPs, cable operators, mobile operators and phone companies located in North America, Europe South America, Oceania and Africa.
The company’s corporate customers primarily purchase its services from it on-net in MTOBs and CNDCs or off-net through other carriers’ last mile connections to those customer facilities in metropolitan markets in North America. This service enables these customers to access the Internet with a high-speed, bi-directional, symmetric circuit with a high degree of reliability and 100% access to that contractual capacity at all times. Depending upon the geographic breadth of the company’s customers’ footprint and their communications requirements, it also sells these corporate customers private network services. Private network services provide connectivity on a point to point or point to multi-point basis. This service allows customers to connect geographically dispersed local area networks in a seamless manner. The company primarily offers these corporate customers speeds ranging from 100 Mbps per second to 1 Gbps per second and in some cases up to 10 Gbps per second. The continued growth in demand for increased bandwidth has led to a rapid shift towards higher capacity circuits.
The company has agreements with multiple national, international and regional carriers providing it last mile network access to over 6 million buildings. These agreements broaden the company’s addressable market for corporate dedicated internet access, VPN services and/or MPLS and enable it to better leverage the skills and capacity of its direct salesforce.
The company’s net-centric customers purchase its services in its 1,646 CNDCs, as well as its 104 data centers and 55 Cogent edge data centers for a total of 1,805 data centers. The company supports these services in 264 metropolitan markets in 56 countries across the world. These bandwidth intensive organizations typically purchase circuits ranging from 10 Gbps up to 400 Gbps, designed to provide them high-speed, bi-directional, symmetric circuits with a high degree of reliability and 100% access to the contractual capacity at all times. In addition to contractual capacity, certain net-centric customers also purchase metered service that enables customers to pay for actual volume of bits delivered on a per bit per second basis. The company also offers a burst product that allows net-centric customers to utilize capacity when they exceed their contractual capacity. The per bit charge for this burst capacity typically exceeds the rate for contractual services. The company also offers colocation services in its data centers. This service offers Internet access combined with rack space and power in the company’s facilities, allowing the customer to locate a server or other equipment at that location and connect to its Internet access service. The company offers wavelength services in 808 CNDCs, in the United States and Mexico.
The company began to serve enterprise customers in connection with its acquisition of the Sprint Business. The company defines enterprise customers as large corporations (typically, Fortune 500 companies or companies with greater than $5 billion in annual revenue) running Wide Area Networks with several dozen to several hundred sites. Enterprise customers generally purchase dedicated internet access, MPLS based VPN’s and other services in on-net and off-net locations. The company’s enterprise customers generally purchase its services on a price-per-location basis.
Sales and Marketing
Direct Sales: The company employs a direct sales and marketing approach. The company’s sales personnel work through direct contact with potential customers in, or intending to locate in, its on-net buildings. Through agreements with building owners and CNDC operators, the company is able to initiate and maintain personal contact with its customers by staging various promotional and social events in its MTOBs and CNDCs. Sales personnel are compensated with a base salary plus quota-based commissions and incentives. The company uses a customer relationship management system to efficiently track sales activity levels and sales productivity.
Indirect Sales: In 2024, the company discontinued its indirect sales program.
Marketing: The company uses a limited amount of web-based advertising. The company’s marketing efforts are designed to drive awareness of its products and services, to identify qualified leads through various direct marketing campaigns and to provide its sales force with product brochures, collateral materials, in building marketing events and relevant sales tools to improve the overall effectiveness of its sales organization. In addition, the company conducts building events and public relations efforts focused on cultivating industry analyst and media relationships with the goal of securing media coverage and public recognition of its Internet access, colocation and private network services.
History
The company was founded in 1999. The company was incorporated in 2014. It was formerly known as Cogent Communications Group, Inc. and changed its name to Cogent Communications Holdings, Inc. in 2014.
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