95th percentile billing measures your bandwidth every 5 minutes, discards the top 5% of samples, and bills you on what's left. At IDACORE Boise, that means predictable per-Mbps transit pricing — 1G at $450/mo, 10G at $1,350/mo — instead of egress fees that scale unpredictably with your success like AWS and Azure charge.
What Is 95th Percentile Billing, Actually?
Here's the mechanics. Your router pushes traffic samples every 5 minutes — 288 samples a day, roughly 2,016 a week. Sort them high to low, throw out the top 5%, and whatever sample sits at that 95th mark is your bill. It's designed to absorb bursts without punishing you for them.
That top-5% cutoff matters more than people think. A DDoS spike, a viral traffic moment, a batch job that saturates your uplink for twenty minutes at 3am — none of that hits your bill if it falls in the discarded 5%. Compare that to cloud egress billing, which counts every byte, every time, no exceptions.
We built our transit on our own ASN, peering at the Seattle Internet Exchange the same way we did running our ISP for over a decade. When you buy transit from IDACORE Boise, you're buying capacity we've engineered ourselves — not a reseller markup on somebody else's circuit. We control the routing, the peering relationships, and the traffic engineering. That's the difference between "we sell bandwidth" and "we run a network."
Why Does Commit Tier Pricing Work Better Than Pay-Per-Byte?
Committed bandwidth pricing means you pick a tier — 100M, 1G, 10G, 100G — and you know the ceiling. At 10G committed, you're at $1,350/month, or $0.135/Mbps. At 100G, it drops under $0.10/Mbps. You can forecast this into next year's budget with a spreadsheet, not a crystal ball.
Hyperscaler egress doesn't work that way. AWS charges per GB out to the internet, and that number moves with your traffic — which means it moves with your business growing. The better your product does, the scarier your egress line item gets. I've watched teams throttle their own API rate limits to control cloud bills. That's backwards. Your infrastructure cost should scale with a contract you signed, not punish you for having customers.
How Much Does Egress Actually Cost at Scale?
Let's run real numbers. Say you're pushing 10 Gbps sustained average egress out of a hyperscaler — a mid-size SaaS company serving media, video, or API-heavy workloads.
10 Gbps sustained works out to roughly 3,240 TB per month (10,000 Mbps ÷ 8 × 3600 × 24 × 30 ÷ 1000). At AWS's standard $0.09/GB egress rate (after the first free tier and lower-tier discounts), that's close to $291,600/month — and that number climbs the second your traffic does.
At IDACORE Boise, that same 10 Gbps commit runs $1,350/month flat. Even accounting for real-world burstiness where you're not sustaining full line rate 24/7, the gap doesn't close — it widens, because egress is metered per byte with no volume discount steep enough to compete with a flat commit tier.
| Metric | Hyperscaler Egress (~$0.09/GB) | IDACORE Boise 10G Transit |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly cost at 10G sustained | ~$291,600 | $1,350 |
| Billing model | Per-GB, all traffic | 95th percentile, top 5% discarded |
| Predictability | Scales with traffic growth | Fixed at commit tier |
| Burst tolerance | None — every byte billed | Bursts under 5% threshold, free |
| Contract terms | Variable, opaque | 12-month standard |
That's not a rounding error. That's the difference between a line item and a crisis.
What Does This Look Like for a Real Boise Deployment?
Take a video analytics company colocating at IDACORE Boise. They're running inference workloads on-prem, serving processed video streams to clients across the Treasure Valley and beyond. Their egress used to live on a hyperscaler at roughly $38,000/month once their client base grew past a few dozen accounts.
Moving compute to a Boise cabinet — paying $300/kW/month on actual power draw — and buying a 10G committed transit tier dropped their monthly network spend to $1,350, plus colocation power costs typically running $2,000-4,000/month depending on rack density. Total infrastructure cost dropped by well over $30,000/month. That's not a hypothetical margin improvement. That's cash back in the business every single month.
And because we're on-net with seven carriers at Boise — Zayo, Lumen/Level 3, Cogent, CenturyLink, Syringa, Cable One, and Hurricane Electric — that transit doesn't sacrifice reach. Sub-5ms latency to Treasure Valley businesses, 23ms to Seattle, 22ms to Portland, 14ms to Salt Lake City. You're not trading cost for reach. You get both.
Why Does Owning the ASN Matter to You?
When we say we run our own BGP, that's not a technical flex — it directly affects your bill and your uptime. We make routing decisions based on your traffic patterns, not a third party's business priorities. If a peering relationship degrades, we can shift routes ourselves, same day, without opening a ticket with an upstream provider and waiting on their timeline.
That operator posture came from running an actual ISP with our own ASN and peering at the Seattle Internet Exchange for years before IDACORE existed. We know what a bad BGP hijack looks like at 2am. We know what it costs to have a carrier de-peer without warning. That experience is baked into how we build redundancy into the Boise network today — seven on-net carriers isn't a marketing bullet, it's insurance against exactly the failure modes we've lived through.
What About Contract Flexibility?
Standard colocation and transit terms at Boise run 12 months. Enterprise providers in this space typically lock you into 36-month contracts before you've even proven out your workload. We don't do that. You get a year to validate the deployment, then renew on terms that reflect what you're actually using — not what a legal team decided three years ago made sense.
Combine that with $300/kW/month power billing — metered on actual draw, not reserved capacity — and you get a cost structure that moves with your real usage on both compute and network. No guessing, no over-provisioning insurance against a bill you can't predict.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is 95th percentile billing and how does it work for IP transit?
95th percentile billing samples your bandwidth usage every 5 minutes, discards the highest 5% of samples, and bills you based on the remaining peak. It protects you from being billed for short bursts or spikes while still reflecting your sustained traffic needs. IDACORE Boise uses this model across all committed transit tiers, from 100M to 100G.
How much does IP transit cost at IDACORE Boise?
Pricing is tiered by committed bandwidth: 100M at $150/month ($1.50/Mbps), 1G at $450/month ($0.45/Mbps), 10G at $1,350/month ($0.135/Mbps), and 100G at $9,750/month (under $0.10/Mbps). All tiers use 95th percentile billing and are on-net at IDACORE Boise with seven carrier options.
Why is hyperscaler egress more expensive than dedicated transit?
Hyperscalers bill egress per GB with no ceiling, so costs scale directly with your traffic growth. A sustained 10 Gbps egress load can run over $290,000/month on standard AWS pricing. IDACORE Boise's 10G committed transit tier for the same throughput runs $1,350/month flat, because you're paying for committed capacity, not metered bytes.
Does IDACORE resell transit from another provider?
No. IDACORE operates its own ASN and handles BGP peering directly, including relationships built from founding and running an ISP with peering at the Seattle Internet Exchange. Routing decisions, peering, and traffic engineering are done in-house, not purchased from an upstream reseller.
What carriers does IDACORE Boise connect to?
IDACORE Boise is on-net with seven carriers: Zayo, Lumen/Level 3, Cogent, CenturyLink, Syringa, Cable One, and Hurricane Electric. This gives customers carrier diversity for redundancy and route optimization without needing to negotiate separate carrier contracts.
If your egress bill has become a monthly source of anxiety, it's worth running the math on committed transit at IDACORE Boise — where 95th percentile billing and seven on-net carriers mean predictable costs without sacrificing reach. Talk to our team about your bandwidth needs.
