Pick 1G if your measured 95th percentile will stay under roughly 700 Mbps through 2026. Pick 10G if you'll cross that line during your 12-month term or your daily peaks keep climbing. At IDACORE Boise, a 1G commit is $600/month ($0.60/Mbps) and a 10G commit is $2,000/month ($0.20/Mbps). Both are billed at 95th percentile from our own ASN.
How Does 95th Percentile Billing Change the Commit Math?
You aren't paying for your peak. You're paying for your 95th percentile, and that difference shapes your whole sizing decision.
Here's the mechanism. The port gets sampled every 5 minutes. Over a 30-day month that's 8,640 samples. Sort them, throw away the top 5% (432 samples, which comes to 36 hours of traffic), and the highest number left is what you're billed on. A backup job that saturates the link for two hours at 3 a.m. disappears into the discarded 5%. A software release that spikes for an afternoon disappears too.
What doesn't disappear is your business-day peak. Say your traffic climbs every weekday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mountain. That's 8 hours times about 22 workdays, or roughly 176 hours a month at peak. Only 36 hours get discarded, so your business-hours plateau becomes your bill.
That's why sizing off the average fails. If your average is 250 Mbps and your weekday plateau is 600 Mbps, you're a 600 Mbps customer. Size for the plateau.
Where Does 1G Stop Making Sense?
Here are the published IDACORE transit tiers. They're on-net at all three of our locations, including Boise:
| Commit tier | Monthly price | Per-Mbps | Comfortable 95th ceiling (~70%) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 100M | $170 | $1.70 | ~70 Mbps |
| 1G | $600 | $0.60 | ~700 Mbps |
| 10G | $2,000 | $0.20 | ~7 Gbps |
| 100G | $11,050 | $0.111 | ~70 Gbps |
Why 70%? Because the 95th percentile hides your worst 36 hours. If your 95th is already at 900 Mbps on a 1G, then the samples you're not seeing are pinned against the ceiling. Your users notice that before your monitoring does: slower API responses during peak, TCP backing off, and support tickets that say "the app is slow sometimes." Keep the 95th around 70% of commit and those top-5% intervals still have room to breathe.
So 1G is the right answer for a lot of Boise shops. If your 95th sits at 300 Mbps and grows slowly, 10G is $1,400/month of headroom you won't touch.
The crossover arrives in two ways.
Capacity. Once your 95th sits near 700 Mbps, you're out of comfortable room on 1G. Moving to 10G costs $1,400 more per month and gives you nine more gigabits of runway.
Unit economics. At $2,000/month, 10G matches the per-Mbps cost of a fully saturated 1G at about 3.3 Gbps of 95th traffic ($2,000 ÷ $0.60). Above that, 10G is the cheaper way to move each megabit, and it isn't close.
Most teams land between those two points. They're past 700 Mbps but nowhere near 3.3 Gbps, and they're deciding whether the headroom is worth $1,400 a month. If your growth curve is steep, it is.
How Do You Project 2026 Traffic From What You Have Today?
Don't guess. Pull at least 90 days of 5-minute samples from LibreNMS, Observium, your switch's SNMP counters, or your current provider's portal. Then do the math the way a transit provider does:
# samples: 5-minute average rates in Mbps, one per interval
# use max(inbound, outbound) per interval for a conservative model
def p95(samples):
s = sorted(samples)
return s[int(len(s) * 0.95) - 1] # 8,640 samples -> the 8,208th value
def months_until(current_p95, monthly_growth, ceiling):
months, rate = 0, current_p95
while rate < ceiling:
rate *= 1 + monthly_growth
months += 1
return months
print(months_until(720, 0.04, 1000)) # -> 9
Calculate your 95th for each of the last three months and take the month-over-month change as your growth rate. That's crude, but it beats a gut feeling.
Two real-shaped scenarios:
A Treasure Valley SaaS company at 720 Mbps, growing 4% a month. It's already past the 70% line on 1G. At that growth rate, it hits 1 Gbps in month 9 and ends the year around 1.15 Gbps. A 1G commit fails before the 12-month term ends. 10G at $2,000/month is the right call. Paying the extra $1,400 a month is cheaper than troubleshooting a congested link in September.
A regional MSP at 280 Mbps, growing 1.5% a month. Twelve months out, it's around 335 Mbps. 1G at $600/month carries that with room to spare. Buying 10G here means paying for capacity it won't use until 2028 or later.
If you're coming off a hyperscaler, you won't have port samples. You'll have a bill in GB. Convert it: monthly egress in TB × 3.09 gives you average Mbps over a 30-day month. Business traffic usually runs a peak-to-average ratio around 2x, so double that figure for a rough 95th. A 100 TB month averages about 309 Mbps, which puts the 95th around 620 Mbps. That's a 1G customer, close to the line.
One more lever: our standard terms are 12 months. Enterprise providers typically want 36. A shorter term means a wrong guess about 2026 doesn't follow you into 2029. You size, you measure, and you revisit at renewal with real data.
How Does a Flat Transit Commit Compare to Hyperscaler Egress?
This is the comparison that tends to end the debate. Hyperscaler egress is billed per GB, so your bill grows with every customer you add. Transit at 95th percentile is billed on the rate you commit to. Same traffic, very different invoices.
The hyperscaler column below uses typical public list pricing for internet egress: about $0.09/GB for the first 10 TB, tapering to about $0.05/GB above 150 TB. Your negotiated rates may differ. The 95th estimates assume a 2x peak-to-average ratio.
| Monthly egress | Avg rate | Est. 95th | IDACORE tier | IDACORE transit/mo | Typical hyperscaler egress/mo |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20 TB | ~62 Mbps | ~125 Mbps | 1G | $600 | ~$1,750 |
| 100 TB | ~309 Mbps | ~620 Mbps | 1G | $600 | ~$7,800 |
| 250 TB | ~772 Mbps | ~1.5 Gbps | 10G | $2,000 | ~$16,300 |
| 600 TB | ~1.85 Gbps | ~3.7 Gbps | 10G | $2,000 | ~$33,800 |
The IDACORE column is transit only. You'll also pay $300/kW/month for colocation power, billed on what your gear draws, not on how many rack units it fills. Even with power added, the gap at 250 TB and above isn't subtle. It's also why our customers typically land 30–40% below comparable AWS, Azure, or GCP spend once the whole bill is counted.
Look at the bottom two rows. Egress more than doubles from 250 TB to 600 TB. The 10G commit stays at $2,000. That's the predictability argument in one line. Your CFO can forecast a commit. Nobody can forecast per-GB egress on a product that's growing.
Why Does It Matter Who Runs the Routing?
Because the commit is only half of what you're buying. The other half is where your packets go once they leave the building.
IDACORE transit comes from our own ASN, with BGP peering we run ourselves. The people building it founded and operated an ISP and peered at the Seattle Internet Exchange. When we pick upstreams, adjust local preference, or move traffic off a congested path, we make those calls ourselves. We don't open a ticket with a wholesaler and wait.
IDACORE Boise has seven on-net carriers: Zayo, Lumen/Level 3, Cogent, CenturyLink, Syringa, Cable One, and Hurricane Electric. That diversity gives us real choices when a path degrades. From Boise, we see 23ms to Seattle, 22ms to Portland, 14ms to Salt Lake City, and under 5ms to Treasure Valley businesses. Our goal is the fastest network to everyone in Idaho, and the routing decisions behind that goal are made in-house.
If you're multihoming with your own ASN, size each provider's commit on the traffic you'll steer to it, not on your total. Then put the larger commit with whoever gives you the better paths to your users. For Idaho users, we think that's us.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does 10G IP transit cost in Boise?
At IDACORE Boise, a 10G transit commit is $2,000/month, which works out to $0.20/Mbps, billed at the 95th percentile. It's delivered from IDACORE's own ASN, not resold from another provider. The other published tiers are 100M at $170/month, 1G at $600/month, and 100G at $11,050/month. Transit is on-net at all IDACORE locations, and standard terms run 12 months instead of the 36 that enterprise providers typically require.
How is 95th percentile bandwidth billing calculated?
Your provider samples your port rate every 5 minutes. A 30-day month produces 8,640 samples. Sort them from lowest to highest, discard the top 5% (432 samples, about 36 hours), and the highest remaining value is your billable rate. Short bursts cost nothing. Sustained daily peaks set your bill. Model it on the higher of inbound or outbound traffic per interval so your estimate errs high, not low.
When should I upgrade from a 1G to a 10G transit commit?
Move to 10G when your measured 95th percentile sits above roughly 700 Mbps, or when your growth rate puts you past that line before your 12-month term ends. At IDACORE Boise, the step from 1G ($600/month) to 10G ($2,000/month) costs $1,400 more per month and buys nine more gigabits of headroom. Above about 3.3 Gbps of 95th traffic, 10G beats a fully loaded 1G on cost per Mbps.
Is IP transit cheaper than AWS egress?
For most steady workloads, yes, and by a lot. Moving 100 TB/month out of a hyperscaler at typical list egress pricing runs about $7,800. That traffic averages around 309 Mbps, so a 95th percentile near 620 Mbps fits a 1G commit at IDACORE Boise for $600/month. Transit is flat and predictable. Per-GB egress grows with every new customer. Colocation power is billed separately at $300/kW/month.
Does IDACORE offer a 100 Mbps transit tier for small deployments?
Yes. IDACORE's 100M transit commit is $170/month ($1.70/Mbps), billed at the 95th percentile and on-net at all locations. It pairs well with per-U colocation at IDACORE Boise. You can rent a single rack unit, and you pay $300/kW/month for the power your gear draws, not for the space. One 200W server in 1U costs $60/month in power. If you outgrow 100M, the 1G tier is $600/month.
Still not sure whether your traffic is a 1G or a 10G problem? Send us 90 days of port graphs or your last three cloud egress bills. We'll run the 95th percentile math with you and tell you plainly which commit fits, with the transit coming from our own ASN on flat, published pricing. Get your Boise transit commit sized by our network team.
