Light Reading Podcasts

Cogent Communications CEO Dave Schaeffer founded his company in 1999 to sell symmetrical, low-cost, Internet connectivity to businesses. That whole time he's said some variation of the same thing about Cogent – he knows it's a commodity business and it's much simpler that way. "Look, we don't sell things that people don't want," Schaeffer told Light Reading in 2018. "We only sell things people want, and we sell it cheaper. It's not really complicated." Now Cogent operates in 47 countries, connects to nearly 1,300 data centers and is constantly building one of the most interconnected, high-capacity Internet backbones in the world. In this podcast, we talk about why companies are still buying huge amounts of bandwidth even when their offices aren't full of people. We also cover the significance of Cogent's recent traffic growth – close to early pandemic levels – and how that underscores the trends we're seeing in the consumer video streaming market (and why that growth will keep on going).