Hurricane Electric vs Cogent for the Balkans and Europe: Why HE Is the Better Upstream in 2026

For a network in the Balkans or anywhere in Europe, Hurricane Electric (AS6939) is the better first or second upstream than Cogent (AS174) in 2026, and the reason is peering. In the Hurricane Electric vs Cogent comparison, HE peers openly at 334 internet exchanges worldwide, 20 of them in the Balkans, and it carries IPv6 to the networks Cogent does not. Cogent has no public exchange ports at all in PeeringDB, lists its peering policy as "No", and public routing data shows no direct IPv6 link between Cogent and HE, a gap first reported in 2009. Cogent still has real strengths, mainly low prices per megabit and a very large IPv4 customer base, so the best setup is often both, with HE in the mix.

Key facts, checked on 15 October 2026:

• Hurricane Electric's PeeringDB record shows an Open peering policy and connections to 334 internet exchanges in 343 facilities, with 56,001 Gbit/s of exchange ports listed (PeeringDB, AS6939).
• Cogent's PeeringDB record shows peering policy "No" and 0 internet exchange connections, in 816 facilities (PeeringDB, AS174).
• In the 11 Balkan countries covered here, PeeringDB lists 33 exchanges. HE is connected to 20 of them with 2,200 Gbit/s of ports. Cogent is connected to none.
• CAIDA's AS Rank dataset of 1 October 2026 infers 7,801 peers for HE and 100 peers for Cogent. Cogent has the larger customer base: 6,482 direct customer networks against HE's 2,261 (CAIDA AS Rank).
• RIPEstat saw 367 routes to HE's IPv6 block 2001:470::/32 and 316 routes to Cogent's 2001:550::/32. Not one of them passed through the other network (RIPEstat, 15 October 2026, 13:59 UTC).

The verdict in one table

HE peers at hundreds of exchanges, Cogent at none

This is the difference that matters most for a small network, so it comes first. An internet exchange (IXP) is a switch in a data centre where many networks plug in and trade traffic with each other directly. Being at the same exchange as a big carrier only helps you if the carrier is willing to peer with you there.

Hurricane Electric is. Its peering page lists the policy as Open for both IPv4 and IPv6. The main conditions are that you share at least one exchange with HE, keep an up-to-date PeeringDB entry, peer at every exchange you both use, and send HE traffic only for the routes it announces to you. In PeeringDB, HE is connected to 334 of the 1,329 exchanges listed worldwide: 137 in Europe, 113 in North America, 40 in Asia Pacific, 19 in Australia, 12 each in South America and Africa, and 1 in the Middle East. It is not on every exchange in the world, but on each of those 334 the same open policy applies, and any network on them can ask for a session. No other transit carrier in PeeringDB lists more exchange connections; only Cloudflare (356) and Packet Clearing House (335), which do not sell transit, list more.

Cogent has zero public exchange connections in PeeringDB and states its peering policy as "No". Cogent does interconnect with other large networks, but PeeringDB lists none of that on a public exchange, so those links are private ones. CAIDA's data shows the difference in scale: it infers about 100 peers for Cogent and about 7,800 for HE. For an ISP in Skopje, Sofia or Belgrade the practical meaning is simple. If you join the local exchange, you can set up a free session with HE there in days. There is no exchange where you can do that with Cogent, because PeeringDB lists Cogent on none. To reach Cogent's customers you rely on your own transit, from Cogent or from another carrier.

If you need a BGP session for your own prefixes, our IP transit page explains how that works with us in Skopje and Amsterdam.

Five words to know before you compare carriers

The rest of this article uses a few network terms. Here they are once, in plain words.

• Upstream is the network you pay to carry your traffic to the rest of the internet.
• Transit is that service: your upstream announces your addresses to everyone and gives you routes to everyone, for a monthly fee.
• Peering means two networks swap traffic only between their own customers, usually free of charge. Free peering is called settlement-free.
• Single-homed means you have one upstream. Multihomed means two or more, so one can fail without taking you offline. Our guide to getting your own ASN explains why the RIPE NCC asks for multihoming.
• Tier 1 is a network that reaches the whole internet through peering alone and buys transit from nobody. CAIDA puts both HE and Cogent in its top "clique" of such networks. Wikipedia notes that HE is fully transit-free only in IPv6.

Which Balkan exchanges each carrier is on

We looked up every exchange the brief named in PeeringDB, plus the four big hubs that Balkan traffic often goes through. Port size is HE's listed capacity at that exchange. The exchange Macedonians often call MKIX is listed in PeeringDB as IXP.mk, run by FINKI in Skopje.

Source: PeeringDB API, 15 October 2026. "Members" is PeeringDB's network count for that exchange.

Two honest notes. HE is not at KOSIX, BHNIX or MIXP.me, so a network in Kosovo, Bosnia or Montenegro meets HE in Skopje, Tirana, Belgrade, Sofia or Vienna instead. And buildings are a different story from exchanges: Cogent lists 29 facilities in and around the region against HE's 16, including more sites in Sofia, Bucharest, Athens, Zagreb and Belgrade. Neither carrier is everywhere. In PeeringDB, HE has registered facilities in Skopje (Telesmart DC) and Tirana (RASH, home of ANIX), and Cogent has none listed in North Macedonia, Albania or Kosovo. Our Skopje IP transit page lists Cogent, Hurricane Electric and the national operators as present at Telesmart DC Skopje, so both can be reached in the building.

IPv6: the gap Cogent customers inherit

In October 2009 operators on the NANOG mailing list reported a "broken" IPv6 internet. The cause was that HE and Cogent did not exchange IPv6 routes. HE brought a cake to the NANOG 47 meeting with an invitation to Cogent to peer over IPv6. Cogent said the two networks were connected and that non-disclosure agreements kept it from discussing peering terms (Data Center Knowledge, 22 October 2009).

Seventeen years later the gap is still in public routing data. On 15 October 2026 we checked RIPEstat, which collects routes from hundreds of networks around the world:

• RIPEstat's neighbour list for AS6939 has 11,057 networks. AS174 is not one of them. The list for AS174 has 6,519 networks, and AS6939 is not one of them.
• All 367 routes to HE's IPv6 block 2001:470::/32 avoid Cogent. All 316 routes to Cogent's IPv6 block 2001:550::/32 avoid HE.
• In IPv4 the two do reach each other, but through a third network. Of 335 routes to Cogent's 38.0.0.0/8, three passed through HE, and each one went HE, then Arelion (AS1299), then Cogent. The Wikipedia article on Cogent describes the same IPv4 route via Arelion.

Why should a Balkan ISP care? HE's PeeringDB entry tells peers to expect up to 180,000 IPv6 prefixes from it, and CAIDA counts 2,261 networks buying from HE directly, including the users of its free Tunnel Broker, which hands out a /48 over an IPv4 tunnel. A network whose only IPv6 upstream is Cogent sees only the IPv6 routes Cogent has, and the data above shows no path from Cogent into HE's IPv6 space. As far as the public data shows, networks that take IPv6 only from HE are then out of reach. The opposite is also true: a network with only HE for IPv6 cannot reach networks that have only Cogent. With IPv6 that half-works, browsers fall back to IPv4 after a delay, mail servers retry, and the help desk gets tickets nobody can explain.

If you are rolling out IPv6 to customers in Kosovo, Albania or North Macedonia, the safe rule is: never take IPv6 from Cogent alone, and preferably not from HE alone either. Our guide to using a /48 of IPv6 on a server covers the addressing side.

Check it yourself in two minutes

None of this needs a login. PeeringDB and RIPEstat have free public APIs, and you can repeat our numbers on any machine with curl and Python 3. Numbers move a little every day as routes come and go.

# as a normal user, on any computer with curl and python3
curl -s "https://www.peeringdb.com/api/net?asn=6939" | python3 -c 'import json,sys; d=json.load(sys.stdin)["data"][0]; print(d["name"], d["policy_general"], d["ix_count"], d["fac_count"])'
curl -s "https://www.peeringdb.com/api/net?asn=174" | python3 -c 'import json,sys; d=json.load(sys.stdin)["data"][0]; print(d["name"], d["policy_general"], d["ix_count"], d["fac_count"])'

What we saw: Hurricane Electric Open 334 343 and Cogent Communications, Inc. No 0 816. The columns are name, peering policy, exchange count and facility count.

# as a normal user: how many routes to HE's IPv6 block pass through Cogent, and the reverse
curl -s "https://stat.ripe.net/data/bgp-state/data.json?resource=2001:470::/32" | python3 -c 'import json,sys; r=json.load(sys.stdin)["data"]["bgp_state"]; print(len(r), "routes,", sum(174 in x["path"] for x in r), "through AS174")'
curl -s "https://stat.ripe.net/data/bgp-state/data.json?resource=2001:550::/32" | python3 -c 'import json,sys; r=json.load(sys.stdin)["data"]["bgp_state"]; print(len(r), "routes,", sum(6939 in x["path"] for x in r), "through AS6939")'

What we saw: 367 routes, 0 through AS174 and 316 routes, 0 through AS6939.

Then look at your own path. On our Amsterdam test server we ran mtr, a tool that combines ping and traceroute, against he.net over IPv6, 20 probes per hop, on 15 October 2026:

# as root on the server; 2001:470:0:503::2 is he.net's IPv6 address
mtr -6 -rwzbc 20 2001:470:0:503::2

The second hop was as6939.frys-ix.net at 2.1 ms best, 3.5 ms average: the route entered HE's network at Frys-IX, a public exchange in Amsterdam, which is HE's open peering at work. The last hop, he.net itself, answered at 132.5 ms because that server is in Fremont, California. If you see a long detour through a third carrier on your own trace, that is worth a question to your upstream. The HE BGP Toolkit is free and shows any network's prefixes, peers and upstreams; it is the quickest way to check what a carrier you are about to buy from looks like.

Cogent's history of peering disputes

Peering disputes are not unique to Cogent, but Cogent's record is long and public. The Wikipedia article on Cogent, with cited sources, lists these:

Each of these disputes had two sides. In 2015, for example, Cogent sued Deutsche Telekom, saying it had failed to add interconnection capacity. For a buyer the lesson is not about who was right. A network with only one upstream inherits that upstream's disputes, whoever the carrier is, and a second upstream from a different carrier is the usual protection.

When Cogent is a fine choice

Cogent is one of the largest networks in the world, and there are good reasons to buy from it. In its 2025 annual report (10-K), Cogent says its service is "one of the lowest priced in the marketplace" per megabit. The same filing reports 3,579 on-net buildings in 305 cities across 57 countries, and about 38 million IPv4 addresses owned. CAIDA infers a customer cone of 40,788 networks for Cogent against 22,084 for HE, so a lot of the internet sits directly behind Cogent.

That makes Cogent sensible in these cases:

• As a second upstream next to HE or a regional carrier, where its low price per megabit and its large customer base shorten many IPv4 paths.
• For heavy IPv4 traffic where cost per megabit decides, such as video delivery or large downloads, as long as IPv6 also comes from someone else.
• When Cogent is already in your building and a cross-connect is cheaper than transport to another city.

HE has limits too. It is transit-free only for IPv6. In IPv4 it reaches Cogent through Arelion, as the routes above show, and Wikipedia's dispute list shows that peering gaps can appear between any two large networks. Both drop RPKI-invalid routes according to isbgpsafeyet.com (both since June 2020), so you need correct ROAs with either one, and large carriers generally expect matching IRR route objects too. HE is also absent from KOSIX, BHNIX and MIXP.me, and Cogent is in more than twice as many buildings. Single-homing to HE is better than single-homing to Cogent for IPv6 reach, but single-homing to anyone is a risk.

Decision table for Balkan ISPs and hosters

For the vantage-point row, distance still matters. On 6 October 2026 we measured our own servers with ping.pe: our Amsterdam server answered Frankfurt in 6.6 ms and London in 6.7 ms, and our Prishtina server answered Vienna in 18.6 ms and Frankfurt in 27.8 ms, while Skopje is about 3 ms from Prishtina on our own network. Every plan comes with its own IPv4 and IPv6, and servers in Amsterdam get their own /48. Availability by city is on the plans page. For transit itself, see IP transit in Skopje for Balkan networks and IP transit in Amsterdam for Western Europe.

Frequently asked questions

Is Hurricane Electric better than Cogent?

For peering and IPv6, yes. On 15 October 2026 PeeringDB showed HE with an Open policy at 334 internet exchanges and Cogent with policy "No" at none, and RIPEstat showed no IPv6 route between the two networks. Cogent is strong on price per megabit and IPv4 customer base, so many networks use both.

Does Cogent peer at internet exchanges?

No. Cogent's PeeringDB record lists 0 public exchange connections and a peering policy of "No". It interconnects with large networks over private links. A small network on the same exchange cannot set up a peering session with Cogent; it has to buy transit to reach it.

Do Hurricane Electric and Cogent peer over IPv6?

Not as far as public routing data shows. The gap was first reported in 2009, and on 15 October 2026, none of 367 routes to HE's IPv6 block and none of 316 routes to Cogent's IPv6 block seen by RIPEstat passed through the other network. In IPv4 they reach each other through Arelion (AS1299).

How many internet exchanges is Hurricane Electric on?

334 according to PeeringDB on 15 October 2026, including 137 in Europe and 20 in the Balkans. That is not every exchange in the world (PeeringDB lists 1,329), but no other transit carrier lists more. Balkan examples are IXP.mk in Skopje, ANIX in Tirana, SOX in Belgrade, BIX.BG in Sofia and InterLAN in Bucharest.

Can I use Cogent as my only upstream?

You can, but you will not reach networks that get IPv6 only from HE, and you will be affected if Cogent has a dispute with another carrier. With two upstreams from different carriers, such as HE and Cogent, both problems go away.

Is Hurricane Electric a tier 1 network?

CAIDA places HE in its top clique of transit-free networks, alongside Cogent. HE is fully transit-free in IPv6; in IPv4 its routes to Cogent pass through Arelion, so in IPv4 it is not strictly tier 1 by the classic definition.

Pick the second path before you need it

The data points one way: if you can choose only one carrier to add, choose the one that peers openly, has the wider IPv6 peering and is already on the exchanges in Skopje, Tirana, Belgrade and Sofia. That is Hurricane Electric. Add Cogent if its price suits your IPv4 traffic, never as your only IPv6 path. To get a BGP session in Skopje or Amsterdam, start at our IP transit page, and if you have questions about your ASN, prefixes or routing, message us on Telegram.

← All articles