Cogent was founded on the premise that bandwidth can be treated like a commodity - produce mass amounts and position it for sale based on price. Leveraging new technologies, we built our own IP data network independent of the traditional voice-based networks owned by the RBOCs (regional bell operating companies). By doing so, we believed we could reduce the cost of high quality bandwidth down to a level never before offered in the marketplace. Today, we are widely recognized as one of the largest carriers of Internet traffic in the world.