If your Boise infrastructure depends on one carrier, you don't have a network — you have a single point of failure with a service contract attached. IDACORE Boise runs seven on-net carriers (Zayo, Lumen/Level 3, Cogent, CenturyLink, Syringa, Cable One, Hurricane Electric) so your traffic has real path diversity, not just a backup line that happens to share the same upstream.
Why Does One Uplink Fail Even With a Backup Circuit?
I've run an ISP. I've peered at the Seattle Internet Exchange. I've watched a "redundant" connection go dark because both circuits — sold by two different resellers — rode the same physical conduit under the same street, cut by the same construction crew on the same Tuesday afternoon. That's not redundancy. That's the illusion of redundancy sold by people who never checked the fiber map.
Real route diversity means three things have to be true simultaneously:
- Different physical fiber paths into the building
- Different carrier networks upstream, not resold circuits from the same wholesale provider
- Different BGP paths so a routing failure on one carrier doesn't take down your announcement everywhere
Most colocation facilities give you one, maybe two carriers, and call it done. We built Boise with seven because we know what an outage costs a business that runs its checkout, its API, or its patient portal through a single pipe.
What Happens When Cogent Has a Bad Day?
Cogent is a great network for the price, and we run it. It also has occasional peering disputes and route flaps like any large transit provider. When that happens on a single-carrier deployment, you're down, full stop, and you're on hold with a support queue that doesn't know your rack number. When it happens on a multi-homed Boise deployment, our BGP configuration shifts traffic to Zayo or Hurricane Electric within seconds, and most customers never notice. That's the entire value proposition in one sentence.
How Does IP Transit Pricing Work in Boise?
We price transit on committed bandwidth, billed 95th percentile, same model I ran at my own ISP:
| Commit | Monthly Price | Effective Rate |
|---|---|---|
| 100M | $150/mo | $1.50/Mbps |
| 1G | $450/mo | $0.45/Mbps |
| 10G | $1,350/mo | $0.135/Mbps |
| 100G | $9,750/mo | <$0.10/Mbps |
95th percentile billing means we sample your traffic every 5 minutes, discard the top 5% of readings, and bill on what's left. It rewards steady usage and doesn't punish you for a traffic spike during a product launch. Compare that to hyperscaler egress, where every gigabyte out the door has a per-GB price tag and no ceiling in sight.
A Real Comparison: Egress vs. Transit
Take a media company serving 40TB of video egress a month. On AWS at roughly $0.07/GB average blended rate, that's $2,800/month in egress alone — before compute, before storage, before anything else. On IDACORE Boise, the same workload fits comfortably in a 10G commit at $1,350/month flat, with headroom to grow before you'd even consider bumping to 100G. That's not a marginal difference. That's the kind of number that shows up in a board meeting.
What Does "On-Net" Actually Mean Here?
On-net means the carrier's fiber physically terminates in our Boise facility at 2653 S Victory View Way. It's not a virtual cross-connect routed through a meet-me room three states away. When we say seven on-net carriers, we mean seven distinct physical entries, seven distinct upstream relationships, and seven distinct paths your traffic can take out of the building.
This matters for two kinds of customers. First, anyone running BGP with their own ASN who wants to multi-home for real redundancy — you get to pick which two, three, or four carriers make sense for your traffic profile and your risk tolerance. Second, anyone who just wants transit from us directly, no BGP session required. We run the routing, we make the peering decisions, and we announce your prefixes with the diversity built in already.
Do You Need Your Own ASN to Benefit?
No. This is a common misconception. If you're a 2U deployment running a single application server, you don't need to file for an ASN with ARIN and run your own BGP sessions to benefit from carrier diversity. We handle that engineering as part of the transit service. Your traffic still moves across whichever carrier has the best path at that moment — you just don't have to manage the routing table yourself.
If you do run your own ASN, we'll set up direct BGP sessions and you control your own route preferences, AS-path prepending, and community tagging. Either model gets you the same underlying seven-carrier diversity.
What Latency Should Treasure Valley Businesses Expect?
Sub-5ms to Treasure Valley destinations, because the traffic doesn't have to leave the region to find its next hop. From Boise, we're also seeing 23ms to Seattle, 22ms to Portland, and 14ms to Salt Lake City — numbers that matter if you're serving customers across the broader Pacific Northwest and Mountain West, not just locally.
This is where operating our own ASN pays off in ways a resold connection can't match. We make peering decisions based on actual path performance, not based on whichever wholesale agreement happens to be cheapest that quarter. When Hurricane Electric offers a better path to a specific destination network, we can prefer it. When Syringa has better regional reach for an Idaho-specific customer base, we route accordingly. That's traffic engineering, and it's something we do daily, not a feature we bought once and forgot about.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many carriers does IDACORE Boise have on-net?
Seven: Zayo, Lumen/Level 3, Cogent, CenturyLink, Syringa, Cable One, and Hurricane Electric. All terminate directly in the Boise facility at 2653 S Victory View Way, giving us physical diversity down to the fiber entrance, not just logical diversity across a single carrier's backbone.
What does 95th percentile billing mean for IP transit?
We measure your traffic in 5-minute intervals over the month, throw out the top 5% of samples, and bill on whatever's left. It absorbs short bursts without penalizing you, unlike per-GB egress billing that charges for every byte regardless of pattern. A 1G commit runs $450/month flat.
Is BGP multi-homing worth it for a small deployment?
If downtime costs you real money, yes. Even a single-cabinet deployment can multi-home across two of our seven carriers for meaningful redundancy. You don't need enterprise scale to justify it — you need an ASN or the willingness to run BGP with us managing the underlying complexity.
How does IDACORE's transit pricing compare to hyperscaler egress?
Our 10G commit runs $1,350/month ($0.135/Mbps) at 95th percentile. AWS charges $0.05-0.09/GB for egress with no cap, so a workload pushing 50TB/month can run $2,500-4,500 in egress alone, on top of compute costs. Flat transit pricing is predictable; egress billing scales with your success and punishes it.
Do I need my own ASN to get route diversity in Boise?
No. You can multi-home through our upstream relationships without running your own ASN — we handle the BGP engineering. If you do have your own ASN and want to peer directly, we support that too. Either way, you get the same seven-carrier diversity at the facility level.
If a single-uplink connection has ever cost you a bad afternoon, it's worth a conversation about what real carrier diversity looks like. Talk to us about IP transit and colocation at IDACORE Boise and we'll walk through a multi-homing plan built around your actual traffic, not a sales quota.
