A 10G committed transit pipe from IDACORE Boise costs $2,000/month flat — $0.20/Mbps — billed at 95th percentile on our own ASN. Cloud egress for equivalent sustained throughput runs $4,000-$9,000+/month depending on provider and destination, and it scales unpredictably with your traffic instead of staying fixed.
Why Compare 10G Transit to Cloud Egress At All?
Because most infrastructure teams are still budgeting bandwidth like it's an AWS line item — a variable cost that grows with success and gets scarier every quarter. That's the wrong mental model if you're running colocated infrastructure or thinking about moving workloads out of hyperscale clouds in 2026.
IP transit and cloud egress solve the same problem — getting bits from your infrastructure to the internet — but they're priced on completely different logic. Egress is billed per gigabyte transferred, with tiered discounts that never quite keep up with your actual usage. Transit is billed on your 95th percentile utilization against a committed rate, full stop. One is a metered utility with a surprise waiting at the end of the month. The other is a number you can put in a budget spreadsheet in January and still be right about in December.
We run our own ASN and peer directly at the Seattle Internet Exchange. When you buy transit from us in Boise, you're buying capacity we've engineered and route ourselves — not a resold circuit with a markup baked in.
What Does 95th Percentile Billing Actually Mean?
95th percentile billing measures your bandwidth usage in 5-minute intervals over the month, throws out the top 5% of samples, and bills you on whatever's left. In practice, this means brief traffic spikes — a backup job, a DDoS attempt that gets mitigated, a viral traffic burst — don't blow up your bill. You're billed for your sustained real usage pattern, not your worst five minutes.
This is standard practice among carriers and IXPs, and it's how we bill every commit tier at every IDACORE location. Here's the full table:
| 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 your commit rises. That's not a teaser rate — it's the same pricing model we've used since we ran our own ISP. Commit more, pay less per unit, and know exactly what you owe before the month starts.
What Does a 10G Pipe Actually Cost on AWS or Azure?
Let's run real numbers. Say you're pushing 10Gbps sustained, 24/7, out of a cloud region — roughly 3.24 petabytes of egress per month at full utilization, though most workloads run at partial utilization of their pipe. Let's say your actual sustained average is 4Gbps, which is a realistic "10G-committed but not maxed" pattern.
4Gbps sustained for a month is roughly 1.3 PB of egress. AWS egress pricing after the first 100GB free tier runs about $0.05/GB at high volume tiers (and that's the good tier — most customers pay $0.08-$0.09/GB before they hit real volume discounts). At $0.05/GB, 1.3 PB costs you roughly $65,000/month. Even at the most aggressive negotiated enterprise rate — call it $0.02/GB, which requires serious volume commitments and account rep negotiation — you're at $26,000/month.
Compare that to our flat $2,000/month 10G commit in Boise. That's not a rounding difference. That's the gap between a bandwidth bill your CFO forgets about and one that shows up in the board deck.
| Scenario | Monthly Cost |
|---|---|
| IDACORE Boise 10G commit (flat) | $2,000 |
| AWS egress, ~1.3PB @ $0.05/GB | ~$65,000 |
| AWS egress, negotiated enterprise @ $0.02/GB | ~$26,000 |
A healthcare SaaS company we worked with was pushing imaging data out of a cloud region at a sustained 3-4Gbps and paying just under $40,000/month in egress alone. Moving the workload to colocated infrastructure in Boise with a 10G committed transit pipe cut that same bandwidth cost to $2,000/month — a $38K/month swing that paid for the entire colocation footprint by itself.
What About Latency and Route Quality?
Cost isn't the whole story — if the routes are bad, cheap bandwidth doesn't matter. Boise sits at sub-5ms to Treasure Valley businesses, 23ms to Seattle, 22ms to Portland, and 14ms to Salt Lake City. We're on-net with seven carriers — Zayo, Lumen/Level 3, Cogent, CenturyLink, Syringa, Cable One, and Hurricane Electric — giving us multiple upstream paths to engineer around congestion or outages instead of being stuck behind a single carrier's routing decisions.
Because we manage our own BGP, we make peering and routing decisions based on what's actually best for your traffic, not what's most profitable for a reseller sitting between you and the carrier. That's the operational difference between "IP transit" as a checkbox and IP transit as infrastructure someone is actively managing.
How Do You Size Your Commit for 2026?
Don't buy your peak. Buy your realistic sustained load and let 95th percentile billing absorb your spikes. Look at your last 6 months of traffic graphs — if your typical sustained throughput sits around 6-8Gbps with occasional bursts to 10G, a 10G commit at $2,000/month is the right call. If you're consistently pushing past 10G, it's worth talking to us about a 100G commit, where the per-Mbps rate drops to $0.111 and the economics get even more lopsided against cloud egress.
The other piece: pair your transit commit with colocation, and you're not paying separately for compute and bandwidth pricing that don't talk to each other. At $300/kW/month for Boise colocation, billed strictly on power draw with no rack space minimums, you can right-size both sides of the infrastructure bill instead of overpaying for headroom you don't use.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does a 10G IP transit commit cost in Boise?
A 10G committed bandwidth tier at IDACORE Boise costs $2,000/month flat, billed at 95th percentile on our own ASN — that's $0.20/Mbps. There's no per-GB metering and no egress surprise; the price is fixed regardless of how your traffic pattern shifts month to month, as long as your 95th percentile sample stays within the committed tier.
Is 10G transit cheaper than AWS or Azure egress?
For sustained high-bandwidth workloads, yes, dramatically. A workload pushing a sustained 4Gbps average (about 1.3PB/month) costs roughly $26,000-$65,000/month in AWS egress depending on your negotiated rate. The equivalent traffic on a 10G committed transit pipe in Boise costs $2,000/month flat.
What is 95th percentile billing and why does it matter?
95th percentile billing measures your bandwidth in 5-minute samples over the month and bills you on the 95th-highest sample, discarding the top 5%. This means short traffic spikes don't spike your bill — you pay for your real sustained usage pattern, not your worst five minutes of the month.
Does IDACORE resell transit from another carrier?
No. IDACORE runs its own ASN and peers directly at the Seattle Internet Exchange, a legacy of founding and operating our own ISP. We control routing and peering decisions ourselves rather than reselling a carrier's transit with a markup layered on top.
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 us multiple upstream paths for traffic engineering, redundancy, and route optimization rather than depending on a single carrier's network.
If you're staring at a cloud egress bill that's grown faster than your actual traffic and wondering what a flat, predictable number looks like, talk to us about pricing a committed bandwidth tier for your workload — Boise's 10G commit at $2,000/month, on our own ASN, is live and ready to provision now.
