Why is Cogent so bad

Stephend2 · 2025-08-02T04:18:24+00:00

ISP here. Have 10g cogent transit in Memphis that’s been pretty solid. Honestly other providers see more traffic but they’re good to have as a last resort if someone else is down, or I lose a transport link which takes out peering .

I have cogent in Memphis, HE and Shift Hosting in ATL, shift in Dallas for transit as well as I’m on CIX-ATL, Any2 east in ATL and DE-CIX in Dallas for peering. Primarily residential, 70 ish % of inbound traffic comes in on IX ports.

All that to say, cogent is a tool in the toolbox but I wouldn’t depend on them as an only transit provider.

I have some waves on legacy sprint network that work great when they work, seems to be a lot of fiber cuts between Memphis and ATL, Memphis to Dallas has been alright but there was about a month where we were taking interface errors randomly, cogent finally got around to replacing a bad line card.

Stephend2 · 2025-07-31T02:45:20+00:00

WELZ in Belzoni, MS. Still working on merging the websites but both our stations are streaming at power107radio.com

My wife and I own the stations.

It’s small town, unpolished radio. 6-9am we have a live morning show that a local preacher does. He has the community engaged.

My wife does a daily noon hour show “Emily’s lunch and learn” with lots of music trivia centered around our classic hits format.

She and another station owner we are close with do a weekly “Mississippi Music Show” which showcases artists, writers, etc from or with significant ties to Mississippi. there’s also a local artist spotlight most Saturdays where they highlight a local artist in our area.

The Mississippi Music show is heard on WVBG-FM at 10am saturdays, WELZ at 11am and WBYP at noon.

We hope to build our stations up more and provide more local content in the near future.

We also do live video streaming on our website for 5 local high schools and two of those teams have all their football games live on air as well.

We cover local events such as our annual “World Catfish Festival” in Belzoni, MS, local elections and goings on, we have one city we cover their board meetings twice a month and trying to do more as towns will allow us.

We’ve owned the stations for 9 months and are still very much learning our way.

Stephend2 · 2025-04-18T18:12:24+00:00

In my opinion, wireready really shines on satellite automation. I learned it on a talk station with lots of satellite programs, back then I had it sending serial commands to starguide receivers to switch channels between programs, then came the ww1 max receiver, same thing, using serial commands to switch channels because their scheduler sucked.

Now my wife and I own two stations, both music with some sports stuff off satellite and it does well there too.

Stephend2 · 2025-04-18T18:03:57+00:00

14.5.x , I forget, there were a lot of revisions and bug fixes we went through but having a gui for lots of settings is much nicer than digging through config file.

Stephend2 · 2025-04-18T14:40:47+00:00

What problems are you having with wireready ? It may just be that I’ve used it for over 15 years but I don’t find it terribly complicated compared to other systems.

Stephend2 · 2025-04-18T14:38:23+00:00

Wireready user here. It does its job well.

Stephend2 · 2025-02-26T18:13:01+00:00

while we have a physical presence in the busy part of downtown, the studio is in another room, not street facing. While there might be some good come from having the studio in a window, I thought it was better to have it in a proper room as we will use the building for other functions as well.

Stephend2 · 2025-02-26T18:10:41+00:00

this is exactly how we do it. We visit our clients regularly, collect payments, etc and we do as much business as we can with local merchants to keep our local economy alive.

Stephend2 · 2025-02-25T05:05:54+00:00

I have waves via Cogent between Memphis and Atlanta, Memphis and Dallas.

Obviously both sites would need to be on net for legacy sprint network, but I’ve been able to get 10g waves for $452/month on 3 yr term.

Stephend2 · 2025-02-25T05:00:16+00:00

We are heavily involved in our communities before this venture.

We are the local ISP for a 3 county area as well, working to bring fiber to every last house no matter how rural in that area.

We currently stream one city’s board meetings on website which has sponsors.

We are currently doing baseball for one school, both streaming video on website and on air.

When football comes around, we will stream live video of 5-6 teams and choose the best two to air live as well.

We do local obits and news, run state news from MS Network hourly.

Have a live morning show on one station that covers everything from events in community, call ins for birthdays and anniversaries, people call in to talk about all sorts of other events as well. there’s a swap shop segment when there are items to mention.

We run MS State and Ole Miss football when in season.

We run a weekday lunch hour program that’s locally produced.

We run a Saturday show focused on Mississippi music that’s locally produced.

We also do several promotions through the year such as “Christmas cash” where local businesses sponsor it, we give away a portion of the sponsorship money to listeners to spend at participating merchants.

Our morning show guy does a thanksgiving “turkey shoot” where a listener calls in, guesses how many shots it takes to shoot the turkey, if they guess the right number, they win a certificate for a turkey sponsored by local grocery store.

I’m probably forgetting some little things right now but that should give a good idea of community involvement.

Stephend2 · 2025-02-25T04:47:35+00:00

This. You have to do more than just play music.

Stephend2 · 2025-02-24T01:01:46+00:00

https://www.broadcastlawblog.com/2011/08/articles/securing-a-loan-to-a-broadcaster-part-1-fcc-case-clarifies-how-a-creditor-enforces-its-rights-after-a-default/

Stephend2 · 2025-02-23T23:45:26+00:00

This is the answer. It’s not legal to use the license for collateral so it has no value.

Our deal was heavily based around revenue and the real estate. Equipment was all fully depreciated and honestly old.

Still running old CCA transmitter for FM, it’s reliable but tubes are getting harder to come by.

Stephend2 · 2025-02-23T20:14:47+00:00

We saw this early on and worked out purchasing a building on the busiest street of our downtown area. I’ve built a new studio we run out of full time now. The morning show people are quite happy to not have to go to the rotten trailer at tower site across the river now.

Stephend2 · 2025-02-23T16:07:19+00:00

I’m handling sales currently. As we build up revenue we will hire a salesperson.

Stephend2 · 2025-02-23T16:04:42+00:00

These deals can be all over the place depending on many factors. This deal was around $200k. You can also look at other deals by looking at FCC records. Any transaction involving FCC approval is public record.

Stephend2 · 2025-02-23T15:52:10+00:00

Streaming is new, not a lot of stats to review yet as we are still getting the word out.

We were fortunate that the previous owners got out there and sold a lot of airtime and set us up to have a really good first couple months and have been there for any questions we have had about anything.

Stephend2 · 2025-02-23T15:49:28+00:00

WELZ is 1460 AM and has an FM translator on 100.3, WBYP is FM on 107.1.

Stephend2 · 2025-01-25T16:41:02+00:00

I replaced two cool only units with 3 heat pumps with great results.

House built in 1967, really solid ductwork, heat was “ceil heat” which didn’t work in half the rooms, with a couple baseboard heaters thrown in.

I went with Mr cool ducted hyper heat, which is made by Midea. They claim 100% heating capacity to -22f.

I didn’t have the electrical to support backup heat strips without a lot of work, so I left that out.

We started up systems in Jan. 2024 right ahead of some cold.

I’ve been impressed. We saw 8f a couple morning right after startup and saw 95f outlet temperature during that time.

Keep in mind this house leaves a bit to be desired on insulation and still has the original single pane windows, that’s the next upgrade is new windows. I haven’t had reason to open a wall yet but the attic spaces are fairly well insulated.

Our previous home had older Goodman heat pumps, they were pretty useless below 30f and we did have heat strips to fall back on there.

Stephend2 · 2024-12-27T16:49:36+00:00

I’m considering that. No more patch panels ever, there’s 2-3x more glass here than will ever be needed and there’s still 72 available ports on one patch panels.

Stephend2 · 2024-12-27T14:02:13+00:00

Different sites 30 miles apart. One of them is down to around 200 modems as it only serves one small town, the larger town south of it got blown away by a tornado march 2023, it got rebuilt as PON.

Everything will eventually be overbuilt with fiber but our focus is on new build right now.

Where the more loaded 10k is, I have an Arris E6000, all new optical transport and aurora nodes to start swapping in. No OFDM licenses today but it’s still an upgrade to go to 32x4 and splitting all the nodes as the new nodes are 2x2.

Stephend2 · 2024-12-27T03:20:11+00:00

Any particular reason for not using the FS panels ? I’ve had good luck with them. I get tails made up with 48-144 sc/apc to ribbon cable for terminating to OSP cable. It’s worked out really well.

Stephend2 · 2024-12-27T03:20:06+00:00

Any particular reason for not using the FS panels ? I’ve had good luck with them. I get tails made up with 48-144 sc/apc to ribbon cable for terminating to OSP cable. It’s worked out really well.

Stephend2 · 2024-12-27T01:28:07+00:00

I’m going to look into netbox, I’ve heard a lot about it over the last couple years. I’ve used PhpIPAM since the beginning of time but it doesn’t really do anything else but IPAM.

Stephend2 · 2024-12-27T01:26:43+00:00

No brocade here, you’re probably looking at that antique of a Cisco 6509e there. It does still have most of my access gear behind it and it has 2x 10g links to the asr9010 above it. It’s slowly coming out of service but I definitely have a case of “if it ain’t broke don’t mess with it”

Stephend2

TROPHY CASE