95th percentile billing measures your traffic every 5 minutes, throws out the top 5% of samples, and bills you on the highest sample that remains. A single traffic spike from a DDoS attempt or a backup job won't blow up your bill — only sustained usage does. IDACORE Boise bills this way on every transit tier.
How Does 95th Percentile Billing Actually Work?
Here's the mechanic, stripped of marketing fog. Over a 30-day billing cycle, there are roughly 8,640 five-minute intervals (30 days × 24 hours × 12 samples/hour). Your router or our collector samples your inbound and outbound traffic at each interval. At the end of the month, we take the higher of the two directions for each interval, sort all 8,640 numbers from low to high, and throw away the top 432 (the top 5%). Whatever sample is left at the 95th position — that's your billable rate.
This isn't an IDACORE invention. It's the standard model most serious carriers use, and it's the standard for a reason: it absorbs noise without letting you get away with running sustained traffic at commit-tier pricing. A 3am backup job that spikes you to 2Gbps for ten minutes gets discarded in the trim. A customer-facing traffic pattern that sits at 1.8Gbps for six hours a day, every day? That shows up in your bill, because it's not noise — it's your actual load.
The practical effect: short spikes are free. Sustained spikes are not. If your bill is jumping month over month, don't blame "95th percentile" as some kind of billing trick — look at what's actually sustaining traffic above your commit.
What Does a Spike Actually Cost You?
Let's run a real scenario. A Boise-based e-commerce company commits to 1Gbps transit at $600/month ($0.60/Mbps). During a holiday sale, they see a genuine spike: 2.5Gbps sustained for about four hours as checkout traffic surges, then it drops back to a normal 400-600Mbps baseline for the rest of the month.
Four hours is 48 five-minute samples out of 8,640 total — about 0.55% of the month. The 95th percentile trim discards the top 5% (432 samples), so this entire spike gets thrown out before the billing calculation even runs. Their bill stays at the 1Gbps commit rate. That's the mechanism working exactly as designed — a real, legitimate traffic event that doesn't touch their invoice because it didn't last.
Now change the scenario: the same company under-provisions and runs 1.4Gbps sustained for 10 hours a day during a two-week product launch. That's roughly 1,680 samples above their 1Gbps line — nearly 20% of the month's samples. That traffic doesn't get trimmed. Their 95th percentile sample lands well above 1Gbps, and they're looking at an overage or a tier bump.
What Do IDACORE Boise's Transit Tiers Actually Cost?
Pricing is published, flat, and tied to committed bandwidth — not negotiated case by case, not hidden behind a "contact sales" wall.
| Commit Tier | Monthly Price | Per-Mbps Rate |
|---|---|---|
| 100M | $170/mo | $1.70/Mbps |
| 1G | $600/mo | $0.60/Mbps |
| 10G | $2,000/mo | $0.20/Mbps |
| 100G | $11,050/mo | $0.111/Mbps |
Notice the per-Mbps rate drops as commit size goes up — standard bandwidth economics. If you're running 1.2Gbps sustained on a 1G commit month after month, it's usually cheaper to move to the 10G tier than to eat repeated overages at the lower tier's per-Mbps rate. We'll tell you that directly when we see the pattern — we're not incentivized to keep you underprovisioned.
How Does This Compare to Hyperscaler Egress Billing?
This is where 95th percentile billing actually separates itself from the cloud model, and it's worth being blunt about it. AWS, Azure, and GCP bill egress per GB transferred, with no cap, no commit discount at small scale, and pricing that scales linearly with your success. Serve more traffic, pay more — with zero ability to forecast next month's number until the bill arrives.
95th percentile billing is the opposite. You pick a commit tier based on sustained load, you pay that flat rate, and the only way the number moves is if your sustained traffic pattern genuinely shifts. A healthcare SaaS company we've worked with was paying $9,400/month in AWS egress fees alone on a mid-size deployment — API responses, data exports, backup replication, the works. Moving that traffic to a 10G committed transit line at $2,000/month, even accounting for colocation costs on top, cut their total infrastructure spend by more than half. Egress billing punishes growth. 95th percentile billing rewards knowing your baseline.
Why Run This at IDACORE Boise Specifically?
Because we're not reselling someone else's transit. IDACORE runs its own ASN with BGP peering we manage directly — a function of actually having founded and operated an ISP with peering at the Seattle Internet Exchange. When your traffic patterns change, we see it on our own routers, not through a layer of abstraction from an upstream provider's portal. That matters when you're trying to figure out whether a spike was legitimate traffic or something else.
Boise is live today, with seven on-net carriers — Zayo, Lumen/Level 3, Cogent, CenturyLink, Syringa, Cable One, and Hurricane Electric — giving us route diversity that keeps latency low and failover options real. Sub-5ms latency to Treasure Valley businesses, 23ms to Seattle, 22ms to Portland. If you're colocating in Boise at $300/kW/month and pairing it with transit on the same network, you're dealing with one operator who controls both the power bill and the bandwidth bill — not a colo provider pointing you to a third-party carrier for transit questions.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is 95th percentile billing and how does it work?
It's a billing method that samples your bandwidth usage every 5 minutes over a month (about 8,640 samples), discards the top 5% of those samples, and bills you based on the highest remaining sample. This means short traffic spikes — DDoS attempts, backup jobs, brief surges — don't affect your bill. Only sustained usage above your commit tier shows up as a cost.
Will a traffic spike increase my IDACORE Boise transit bill?
Not if it's brief. A spike lasting under roughly 5% of the billing month's total samples gets trimmed before billing calculation. A spike sustained for hours across multiple days, however, can push your 95th percentile sample above your commit tier and trigger an overage or require a tier upgrade.
How much does IP transit cost at IDACORE Boise?
Pricing is tiered by committed bandwidth: 100M at $170/month ($1.70/Mbps), 1G at $600/month ($0.60/Mbps), 10G at $2,000/month ($0.20/Mbps), and 100G at $11,050/month ($0.111/Mbps). All tiers bill on 95th percentile usage, with pricing published and fixed — not negotiated per customer.
Is 95th percentile billing cheaper than AWS or Azure egress billing?
For sustained, predictable traffic, yes — often significantly. Egress billing scales per GB with no cap, so cost grows directly with your traffic volume and success. 95th percentile billing gives you a flat rate tied to a commit tier, and short spikes get discarded entirely. Companies moving from hyperscaler egress to committed transit commonly cut bandwidth costs by 40-60%.
Does IDACORE resell transit from another provider?
No. IDACORE operates its own ASN and manages BGP peering directly, a direct result of having founded and run an ISP with peering at the Seattle Internet Exchange. Routing decisions and traffic engineering happen on infrastructure we control, not through a reseller relationship with an upstream carrier.
If you're trying to figure out whether your current bandwidth bill reflects real sustained usage or just a few bad spikes getting billed like they're permanent, our network team can pull your traffic pattern and show you exactly where your 95th percentile line sits — talk to us about IP transit in Boise.
