Where Cogent Is – Europe

September 14th, 2008 by · 4 Comments

Following up on my Cogent-North America post, let’s now look at Cogent’s European assets.  Once again one is able to derive the total buildings, Cogent-owned datacenters, and neutral datacenters for each city they serve.  With no further ado, here are their top 20 markets by number of lit buildings:

Cogent serves 72 markets in Europe, compared with just 45 in North America.  However, they have just 183 lit buildings in Europe, as opposed to 1142 in North America.  Of those, only 13 are not datacenters – they are probably enterprises (but could be other building types I suppose), and only Paris and Reims have more than one.  Cogent’s top markets are the obvious ones where all the carrier hotels, and it is clear that their European business is almost entirely oriented to their web-centric customers.  Their European network is wide, but not yet deep anywhere.

Here’s a tidbit though which comes out in the complete data.  There are some 17 Cogent-owned datacenters in Europe.  Big deal, right?  Well 16 of them are in France, the sole non-French datacenter being in Frankfurt.  I realize this is likely an artifact of the acquisition spree that brought them their European network, the facilities surely originated with Lambdanet France.  But I had never noticed it before going through this little exercise, and a quick check of Cogent’s recent 10-K shows that they don’t talk about it much.  Not that they have to, but one would think they might mention it.

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Categories: Datacenter · Internet Backbones · Metro fiber

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4 Comments So Far


  • The amount of Cogent data centers in France surpriced me as well when I saw it the first time, didn’t really make sense with the rest of their locations 🙂

  • keys says:

    Rob ,
    you should investigate a bit deeper in this , a large number of sites that cogent reports as popped are actualy Telia popped buildings , cogent has some agreement to use capacity on the telia network (ethernet ports , not dark fiber) up untill 2014 i think , they may have an option to prolongue this,i don’t know , i checked this back when there was a dispute between telia and cogent over peering, its somewhere in filings by cogent … anyway , at one time it will stop … they will lose a huge part of their footprint

  • Rob Powell says:

    If I recall correctly, part of Cogent’s footprint in France is on Neuf Cegetel, and part is on Telia. I’m pretty sure the Neuf part is fiber based, are saying the Telia part is all leased waves etc? Or is this just the datacenter space? I could only find reference to a 2014 expiration on a large bit of square footage of that in one of their 10-k’s.

  • keys says:

    yeh , i could only find this , I might be mistaken ,this is in a filing of 2004, its been formulated differently later

    ” In France, the United
    Kingdom, Belgium, the Netherlands and Switzerland, we have approximately 5,100
    route miles of fiber secured from Neuf Telecom and Telia. We have the right to
    use the Neuf Telecom fiber pursuant to an IRU that expires in 2020. In Germany
    and Austria, we have approximately 2,000 route miles of fiber secured from MTI
    and Telia. We have the right to use the MTI fiber pursuant to an IRU that
    expires in 2019. We have the right to use all of our Telia fiber pursuant to an
    IRU expiring in 2011 with an option to extend to 2019.

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