Cogent

Cogent Communications operates Autonomous System 174, one of the largest Tier-1 internet backbone providers, with a global fiber network spanning North America, Europe, and Asia. As a Tier-1 carrier it reaches the rest of the internet entirely through settlement-free peering rather than paying for transit, and it sells IP transit, dedicated access, and colocation to other networks. Registered in the United States, AS174 is one of the most widely interconnected backbones and a common upstream in the routing paths of countless smaller networks. As a transit backbone, its addresses appear more often as intermediate hops in a route than as the final source of consumer traffic.