Cogent Communications

August 13, 2026 by Hayley Levine

Regional and rural broadband providers are experts at serving their local community. They build fiber to farmhouses, wire main streets, and connect the schools, municipal buildings and healthcare locations that anchor a town. When a family turns on Netflix from their home in Fargo, North Dakota, they trust their local provider to bring high quality bandwidth right to the house. Or a local store making sure they have access to their inventory system and website. What they don’t see is the greater network underlying it. To deliver that Netflix stream or website access, the local operator reaches beyond its own footprint and turns to an upstream provider like Cogent to bring traffic to or carry traffic from the rest of the internet.

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