FNSI is a major Internet access and colocation service provider that is privately held and headquartered in Columbus, Ohio. FNSI provides Internet service to businesses located in Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania. As part of the deal, Cogent also acquired five colocation facilities including those located in Columbus, Pittsburgh, PA and Detroit, MI.

"Two factors combined to make this acquisition very attractive and almost immediately accretive for Cogent. One, migrating FNSI customers onto the Cogent-owned and operated backbone enables us to eliminate the high costs associated with FNSI's leased network backbone. And two, streamlining staff and eliminating redundant infrastructure significantly reduces the overhead," said Helen Lee, Chief Financial Officer for Cogent Communications. "The economies of scale created by owning an all-optical, DWDM network end-to-end cannot be matched by any other ISP today."

Cogent is expecting to complete the migration of all FNSI customers onto Cogent's all optical IP backbone by 6:00 a.m., EST this morning. All of the 400-plus former FNSI customers now enjoy a superior level of performance and reliability through Cogent's non-oversubscribed, 80 Gigabits per second (Gbps) nationwide backbone designed and built exclusively for Internet data traffic.

The acquisition of the FNSI Internet services business was completed through Cogent's wholly-owned subsidiary, Cogent Great Lakes Communications, Inc.