Seven carriers land in the IDACORE Boise meet-me room — Zayo, Lumen/Level 3, Cogent, CenturyLink, Syringa, Cable One, and Hurricane Electric — and we run our own ASN across all of them. Transit is priced by committed bandwidth tier, billed at 95th percentile, from $170/month for 100M up to $11,050/month for 100G.
Why Does On-Net Carrier Diversity Matter in Boise?
Most colocation providers in smaller markets give you one, maybe two, carrier options. You take what's offered, you pay what's asked, and if that carrier has a bad day, so do you. Boise isn't a huge market compared to Seattle or Portland, but IDACORE Boise built a meet-me room with seven on-net carriers precisely because we ran an ISP for years and know what happens when you're single-homed to one upstream.
Seven carriers means real route diversity. Zayo and Lumen give you national backbone reach. Cogent brings aggressive peering density. CenturyLink and Syringa cover regional and Idaho-specific routes efficiently. Cable One adds another regional path. Hurricane Electric — if you've ever worked with IPv6 or run BGP yourself, you know HE's reputation for peering breadth, especially at exchange points like Seattle IX, where we've peered directly.
That diversity isn't decoration. It means we control which carrier handles which traffic based on latency, cost, and congestion — not because a single vendor contract locks us in. We built and operated an ASN before we built this facility. Routing decisions here are engineering decisions, not procurement decisions.
How Does 95th Percentile Billing Actually Work?
If you've never dealt with 95th percentile billing, here's the mechanics: we sample your bandwidth utilization every five minutes, throw out the top 5% of samples (the spikes), and bill you based on the highest remaining sample. It's a standard telecom billing method, and it protects you from being punished for occasional traffic bursts while still reflecting your real sustained usage.
Compare that to cloud egress billing, where every gigabyte out the door hits your invoice at a flat per-GB rate that doesn't care whether you negotiated a commit or not. A SaaS company pushing 50TB out of AWS in a heavy month pays for every one of those terabytes at list price. With 95th percentile transit, a traffic spike from a product launch or a viral moment doesn't blow up your bill — it just doesn't count against you if it's brief.
Example: A Boise-based video analytics company commits to a 1G tier at $600/month. Most days they run 400-600 Mbps. One week they spike to 2 Gbps during a client's big product demo. Under 95th percentile billing, that spike gets excluded from the calculation as long as it's not sustained. Their bill stays at $600. Under egress-based cloud billing, that same week could have added $800-1,200 depending on the workload's per-GB rate.
What Do the Commit Tiers Actually Cost?
Transit here is priced by tier, not by unpredictable overage math. Here's the published table:
| Commit Tier | Monthly Price | Effective $/Mbps |
|---|---|---|
| 100M | $170 | $1.70 |
| 1G | $600 | $0.60 |
| 10G | $2,000 | $0.20 |
| 100G | $11,050 | $0.111 |
Notice the curve: price per Mbps drops sharply as your commit grows. That's normal in transit pricing, but what's not normal is publishing it. Most providers negotiate transit deals behind closed doors and make you ask for a quote, which usually means you're paying based on how well you negotiate rather than what the bandwidth actually costs to deliver. We publish the table because we don't need the leverage of opacity. The economics work at these numbers.
How Does This Compare to Cloud Egress Billing?
Run the math on a company pushing meaningful outbound traffic. Say you're serving video, backups, or API responses at a sustained 5 Gbps average — call it roughly 1.6 PB of egress a month. On a major hyperscaler, egress pricing in that volume range typically lands somewhere between $0.05-$0.09/GB after volume discounts, which puts you at $80,000-$144,000 a month just for the data leaving the building.
At IDACORE Boise, a 10G commit tier at $2,000/month covers that same sustained 5 Gbps with headroom to spare, since 95th percentile billing means occasional bursts above 5G don't change your invoice. That's not a 10% or 20% savings — it's an order-of-magnitude difference, and it's the kind of number that gets a CFO's attention in a budget meeting.
The other piece people miss: hyperscaler egress pricing is genuinely hard to forecast. It scales with your success, which means the month your product takes off is the month your infrastructure bill becomes a surprise. Committed bandwidth transit is the opposite — you know your monthly number in January and you know it in December, assuming you don't upgrade tiers.
What Does On-Net Actually Mean for Latency?
On-net means the carrier has physical presence in our meet-me room — no third-party loop, no extra hop to a carrier hotel across town. That matters for latency and for reliability, since fewer physical handoffs mean fewer points of failure.
From Boise, that translates to real numbers: 23ms to Seattle, 22ms to Portland, 14ms to Salt Lake City. For a Treasure Valley business serving customers or internal teams around the region, sub-5ms latency locally and single-digit-to-low-double-digit latency to major West Coast and Mountain West hubs is a meaningfully different experience than routing through a distant, congested exchange point.
Frequently Asked Questions
What carriers are on-net at IDACORE Boise?
Seven carriers are on-net: Zayo, Lumen/Level 3, Cogent, CenturyLink, Syringa, Cable One, and Hurricane Electric. IDACORE runs its own ASN and BGP peering across all seven, meaning traffic engineering and route selection happen in-house rather than through a reseller relationship.
How is IP transit priced at IDACORE Boise?
Transit is priced by committed bandwidth tier with 95th percentile billing: $170/month for 100M ($1.70/Mbps), $600/month for 1G ($0.60/Mbps), $2,000/month for 10G ($0.20/Mbps), and $11,050/month for 100G ($0.111/Mbps). All tiers are on-net at Boise.
What is 95th percentile billing and why does it matter?
It's a billing method that samples bandwidth every five minutes, discards the top 5% of spikes, and bills based on the highest remaining sample. It protects customers from being billed for brief traffic bursts while still reflecting sustained real-world usage, unlike flat per-GB egress billing.
How does Boise transit pricing compare to AWS or Azure egress?
For sustained high-volume outbound traffic, hyperscaler egress billing often runs 30-40% or more above equivalent committed transit at Boise, and can be far higher at scale since egress is billed per-GB with no cap. A 10G commit at $2,000/month can cover traffic that costs $80,000+/month in cloud egress fees.
Do I need a minimum bandwidth commitment to get transit at IDACORE Boise?
Commits start at 100M for $170/month, so no, you don't need enterprise-scale volume to get on-net transit. Tiers scale up to 100G, and pricing is published rather than quote-only, so you can budget accurately before signing.
Whether you're colocating a single 1U server or building out a full cabinet, pairing it with on-net transit from our own ASN means one bill, one point of contact, and no guessing about what your bandwidth actually costs — talk to our team about a committed bandwidth quote at idacore.com/contact.
