When you talk about scale, you usually compare something very large to something very small.  Cliché’s like an elephant compared to a mouse come to mind or a dinosaur to a human.  But how do you compare the size of ISP’s?  Customers?  Physical miles in the network?  Capacity?  Peering?  Traffic?  There is a plethora of choices. 

When you think about Cogent and scale, you should definitely think about capacity and traffic first.  In those two categories, Cogent is one of the leading providers in the world.  Cogent has an all- IP backbone that ranges in size from 80 Gbps to 180 Gbps.   

Most importantly, the most accurate scale comparison is the traffic carried on your network.  To give you some sense of Cogent’s scale, Cogent carries over 9 Petabytes per day of Internet traffic across its network.  That equates to watching back-to-back full-length movies on the Internet for over 1,300 years.  What happened 1,300 years ago in 700 A.D.?  China invented gunpowder for one.  1,300 years of continuous movies running every day across Cogent’s network.  That’s scale!