IP Transit Pricing Explained: Flat Rate vs 95th Percentile, Commits, and What a Gbit Really Costs

IP transit pricing comes in two shapes: a metered price per Mbps, almost always measured with the 95th percentile method, or a flat price for a port of a fixed speed. Metered transit is cheap per megabit at the wholesale end, with the lowest 10 GigE prices TeleGeography tracked at $0.07 per Mbps a month in mid-2026, but you pay for your busiest sustained hours, in both directions, and the quoted rate is rarely the whole bill. A flat-rate port costs the same every month whatever you push through it, and in exchange it is capped at its speed. Below: how each model is calculated, two example networks billed three ways with a script you can rerun on your own traffic, and a table of which model to ask for when.

Key facts, checked on 28 October 2026:

• The 95th percentile method samples the port, in most cases every 5 minutes, sorts the month's samples, throws away the top 5 percent and bills the next value. In a 30-day month the discarded 5 percent is about 36 hours (Wikipedia, Burstable billing).
• DrPeering's series of U.S. transit prices, metered at the 95th percentile with a minimum commit, runs from $1,200 per Mbps in 1998 to $0.63 per Mbps in 2015, a drop of about 30 percent a year (DrPeering, A Business Case for Peering).
• In Q2 2026 the lowest 10 GigE transit price TeleGeography recorded held at $0.07 per Mbps a month and the lowest 100 GigE price at $0.03; 100 GigE prices fell 17 percent compounded annually from Q2 2023 to Q2 2026 (TeleGeography, 16 September 2026).
• Hurricane Electric's public transit page says "Service starting from $200 per month", with BGP and dual-stack IPv4 and IPv6 included at no extra charge; everything above that is by quote (he.net).
• For scale on the peering side, an AMS-IX 10GE port lists at EUR 650 a month and a 100GE port at EUR 3,240, cross-connects excluded (AMS-IX pricing).

Three terms you need before the maths

Mbps versus MB: transit is sold in megabits per second (Mbps), a speed, while files are measured in megabytes (MB), an amount. With 8 bits to a byte, a steady 1 Mbps for a 30-day month moves about 324 GB, and a 1 Gbit/s port run flat out moves about 324 TB. Transit bills the speed, never the gigabytes.

In versus out: "in" is traffic from the internet to your network, "out" is what you send. A hosting company is out-heavy, an ISP with home users is in-heavy, a DDoS flood is pure in. Most contracts bill the larger of the two.

Peering versus transit: peering is swapping traffic directly with one other network, usually free apart from the exchange port, and it reaches only that network and its customers. Transit is paying a carrier to reach the whole internet. Peering makes transit cheaper but cannot replace it; our guide to Balkan internet exchanges shows where it pays off in this region.

How is bandwidth billed? The three models carriers use

1. Metered on the 95th percentile

The standard wholesale model. You are quoted a price per Mbps a month, the carrier measures your 95th percentile at month end and multiplies. Nearly always there is a minimum commit too, so the real quote reads "300 Mbps commit at $0.50, overage at $0.60". The calculation is in the next section, because almost every surprise bill comes from misreading it.

2. Commit and burst (CDR plus overage)

The contract wrapped around the 95th percentile. The committed data rate (CDR) is what you pay for every month whether you use it or not; DrPeering puts it as being "on the hook for (at least) the commit level worth of transit regardless of how much traffic you send". The port is bigger than the commit, often 10 Gbit/s with a 1 Gbit/s commit, so you can burst above it, and whatever your 95th percentile lands above the commit is overage, billed per Mbps at a higher rate. Bigger commits get lower rates, which is why carriers push you to commit high.

3. Flat-rate port

One price for a port of a fixed speed, 1, 5 or 10 Gbit/s, unmetered: no samples, no commit, no overage, and the full port price even in a quiet month. The cap is hard; a 1 Gbit/s flat port never delivers 1.2 Gbit/s, so you buy the next size when you approach the ceiling. This is the model RS Computers sells, trade-offs below. (Per-terabyte billing exists at hosting companies, but carriers avoid it because their own costs follow peak capacity, not volume.)

95th percentile billing explained step by step

The whole method, to check your own invoice against:

1. The carrier's router counts bytes in and out on your port and a collector reads the counters every 5 minutes; each reading becomes a 5-minute average in Mbps. A 30-day month gives 8,640 samples per direction.
2. The directions are combined. Most carriers keep the larger of in and out for each slot; some compute a 95th percentile per direction and bill the higher; a few add the two. Your contract names which.
3. At month end the samples are sorted and the top 5 percent deleted: 432 samples, which is 36 hours. Those are your free hours; any spike that fits inside them costs nothing.
4. The next sample down, number 433 from the top, is your billable rate. Multiply by the per-Mbps price. With a commit you pay the commit rate up to the commit and the overage rate on the rest, or just the commit if you stayed under it.

The 36 hours are the heart of it. A peak of 1 hour a day is 30 hours a month and gets erased; a peak of 2 hours a day is 60 hours and you pay for it. A network quiet all day and busy every evening is billed as if busy all the time, which the bursty example below shows in numbers. A few providers have offered 90th percentile billing for irregular traffic (Wikipedia cites a 2006 report on Cogent); that only widens the free window to 72 hours.

What IP transit pricing looks like in public sources

Carriers rarely publish rate cards. These are the public data points we could find, each dated; none is a competitor's current quote. If a sales rep's number is far from these, ask about port size, commit and term, because those three decide everything.

The $0.07 and $0.03 figures are for 10 and 100 GigE commits in the cheapest cities in the world; a 1 Gbit/s commit at one carrier in a smaller market costs many times more per megabit. DrPeering's 30 percent a year has also flattened to TeleGeography's 17 percent, so a 2026 buyer should not expect prices to halve by 2028; address prices slowed the same way, as our IPv4 price history shows. And the carrier matters as much as the model: one with wide open peering keeps more of your traffic off its own paid upstreams and can price lower, the point of our Hurricane Electric vs Cogent comparison.

Two example networks billed three ways

This 70-line Python script builds a synthetic month of 5-minute samples, keeps the larger of in and out per slot, computes the 95th percentile and prices it three ways. The traffic profiles are invented examples and so are the prices (EUR 0.25 per Mbps metered, a 300 Mbps commit with overage at 1.5 times that rate, and an example flat 1 Gbit/s port at EUR 300, which is not our price). We ran it on 28 October 2026 with Python 3.14. Change the four constants at the top to your own quotes.

# as a normal user: python3 p95bill.py
# Bills a synthetic 30-day traffic profile three ways: 95th percentile,
# commit + overage, and a flat-rate port. Example numbers, not a price list.
import random

random.seed(7)
SAMPLES_PER_DAY = 24 * 12          # one sample every 5 minutes
DAYS = 30
N = SAMPLES_PER_DAY * DAYS          # 8,640 samples in the month

RATE_P95 = 0.25                     # example: EUR per Mbps, 95th percentile
COMMIT_MBPS = 300                   # example commit (CDR)
RATE_OVERAGE = 0.375                # example overage, 1.5x the commit rate
FLAT_1G_PRICE = 300.0               # example flat 1 Gbit/s port price (not RS's)

def steady():
    # about 400 Mbps out all day, inbound a fifth of that
    out = [400 + random.gauss(0, 15) for _ in range(N)]
    inb = [v * 0.2 for v in out]
    return inb, out

def bursty():
    # 200 Mbps base, every evening 19:00 to 23:00 climbs to about 950 Mbps
    out = []
    for i in range(N):
        hour = (i % SAMPLES_PER_DAY) / 12
        if 19 <= hour < 23:
            v = 950 + random.gauss(0, 25)
        elif 17 <= hour < 19 or 23 <= hour < 24:
            v = 550 + random.gauss(0, 40)
        else:
            v = 200 + random.gauss(0, 15)
        out.append(max(v, 0))
    inb = [v * 0.2 for v in out]
    return inb, out

def with_flood(profile, hours, mbps=900):
    # inbound DDoS flood of <hours> added on top of a profile, starting day 10
    inb, out = profile
    inb = inb[:]
    start = 10 * SAMPLES_PER_DAY
    for i in range(start, start + hours * 12):
        inb[i] += mbps
    return inb, out

def p95(inb, out):
    # per sample take the larger direction, sort, drop the top 5 percent
    peak = sorted(max(a, b) for a, b in zip(inb, out))
    drop = int(round(len(peak) * 0.05))      # 432 samples = 36 hours
    return peak[len(peak) - drop - 1]

def bill(name, inb, out):
    p = p95(inb, out)
    cost_p95 = p * RATE_P95
    over = max(0, p - COMMIT_MBPS)
    cost_commit = COMMIT_MBPS * RATE_P95 + over * RATE_OVERAGE
    peak = max(max(inb), max(out))
    avg = sum(out) / len(out)
    print(f"{name}")
    print(f"  samples {len(out)}, dropped {int(round(len(out)*0.05))} (36 h)")
    print(f"  average out {avg:7.1f} Mbps, true peak {peak:7.1f} Mbps, 95th percentile {p:7.1f} Mbps")
    print(f"  95th pct at {RATE_P95:.3f}/Mbps        : EUR {cost_p95:8.2f}")
    print(f"  commit {COMMIT_MBPS} + overage {over:6.1f} Mbps : EUR {cost_commit:8.2f}")
    print(f"  flat 1 Gbit/s port (example)      : EUR {FLAT_1G_PRICE:8.2f}"
          f"  (flat wins below EUR {min(cost_p95, cost_commit):.2f})")
    print()

bill("A. steady 400 Mbps", *steady())
bill("B. bursty 200 Mbps, evenings to 950", *bursty())
bill("C. steady + 30 h inbound flood of 900 Mbps", *with_flood(steady(), 30))
bill("D. steady + 48 h inbound flood of 900 Mbps", *with_flood(steady(), 48))

The output we got:

A. steady 400 Mbps
  samples 8640, dropped 432 (36 h)
  average out   400.1 Mbps, true peak   455.3 Mbps, 95th percentile   424.9 Mbps
  95th pct at 0.250/Mbps        : EUR   106.22
  commit 300 + overage  124.9 Mbps : EUR   121.84
  flat 1 Gbit/s port (example)      : EUR   300.00  (flat wins below EUR 106.22)

B. bursty 200 Mbps, evenings to 950
  samples 8640, dropped 432 (36 h)
  average out   368.8 Mbps, true peak  1037.3 Mbps, 95th percentile   962.7 Mbps
  95th pct at 0.250/Mbps        : EUR   240.68
  commit 300 + overage  662.7 Mbps : EUR   323.52
  flat 1 Gbit/s port (example)      : EUR   300.00  (flat wins below EUR 240.68)

C. steady + 30 h inbound flood of 900 Mbps
  samples 8640, dropped 432 (36 h)
  average out   399.9 Mbps, true peak   987.9 Mbps, 95th percentile   435.6 Mbps
  95th pct at 0.250/Mbps        : EUR   108.89
  commit 300 + overage  135.6 Mbps : EUR   125.84
  flat 1 Gbit/s port (example)      : EUR   300.00  (flat wins below EUR 108.89)

D. steady + 48 h inbound flood of 900 Mbps
  samples 8640, dropped 432 (36 h)
  average out   399.9 Mbps, true peak   988.5 Mbps, 95th percentile   978.0 Mbps
  95th pct at 0.250/Mbps        : EUR   244.51
  commit 300 + overage  678.0 Mbps : EUR   329.26
  flat 1 Gbit/s port (example)      : EUR   300.00  (flat wins below EUR 244.51)

What the numbers say

Steady network (A). The 95th percentile lands at 425 Mbps, 6 percent above the average, because a flat line has nothing to shave off. The metered bill is EUR 106; the 300 Mbps commit costs more (EUR 122) because 125 Mbps of overage is billed at the higher rate; the example flat port at EUR 300 loses clearly. A steady network with a good per-Mbps quote is where metered transit genuinely wins, and a flat port only competes if its price is near the metered bill. That is the honest answer, and why we tell steady networks to compare our port price with their real quote rather than assume.

Bursty network (B). The average is lower (369 Mbps), but the evening peak lasts 4 hours a day, 120 hours a month, far beyond the 36 free hours, so the 95th percentile is 963 Mbps and the network is billed at its peak. The metered bill more than doubles to EUR 241 and the commit becomes the worst option at EUR 324, because 663 Mbps of overage is charged at the penalty rate. The example flat port now beats the commit and sits within 25 percent of the metered bill, with no risk if the peak grows next month. This is the profile of a game host, a streaming site or an ISP with evening viewers, and the case flat rate was made for. The true peak of 1,037 Mbps would have been clipped on a 1 Gbit/s port, though; the cap is real.

Floods (C and D). A 30-hour inbound flood of 900 Mbps moves the steady network's 95th percentile only from 425 to 436 Mbps, because 30 hours fit inside the discarded 36. A 48-hour flood pushes it to 978 Mbps and the bill from EUR 106 to EUR 245. You did not send that traffic; you pay because the carrier delivered it to your port. On a flat port the flood also arrives and congests the link, but the invoice does not change. Floods are solved by upstream filtering, which is what remote DDoS protection over a GRE tunnel is for; the billing model decides whether an attack also costs money.

Hidden costs in a cheap IP transit quote

"Cheap IP transit" in a search result means a low per-Mbps number. The number is real; the bill is bigger, and this is where the difference comes from:

• Port fee versus traffic fee. Many carriers charge a monthly port or access fee for the physical interface on top of the per-Mbps charge. A low traffic rate next to a high port fee is the oldest trick in the price list.
• The commit floor. A 1 Gbit/s commit at $0.30 is $300 a month even when your traffic is 200 Mbps.
• Overage rate. Check the price above the commit, not only below it. In example B the overage turned a sensible commit into the most expensive option.
• Both directions. A network with heavy inbound backups, mirrors or scrubbing return traffic can be billed on the direction it never thought about.
• Floods count. A sustained attack longer than about 36 hours in a month raises a 95th percentile bill, as example D shows, unless the contract excludes attack traffic, and most do not.
• Cross-connect. The data centre, not the carrier, bills the fibre between your rack and the carrier's: a monthly fee per cross-connect, often with an installation charge, never in the transit quote.
• Remote hand-off. If the carrier sits in another building, a metro wave, dark fibre or transport circuit carries your traffic there, quoted per order and sometimes costing more than the transit.
• Minimum term and setup fee. Wholesale transit usually means a 12, 24 or 36-month contract, with the lowest rates on 36 months, a setup fee and 60 to 90 days' notice. Month to month costs more per megabit where it exists at all.
• BGP and IPv6 as extras. Hurricane Electric states both are included; some carriers bill for a second session, a full table or communities. Make every carrier state it.

Before any of this you need an ASN and address space, with costs of their own; see what an ASN costs in 2026 and getting your own ASN and IP addresses.

Which billing model fits your network

The last row is the one small networks miss. BGP does not need a physical cross-connect; a GRE, WireGuard, IPsec or VXLAN tunnel over your existing connection carries the session and the traffic and removes the cross-connect and transport lines from the bill. Configurations are in BGP over a tunnel.

How RS Computers bills IP transit, and the catch

We sell flat-rate, unmetered ports of 1, 5 or 10 Gbit/s from AS213900 at two PoPs: Skopje (Neocom DC, where we also peer openly on IXP.mk with a 100G port) and Amsterdam (Qupra DC, hand-off at Nikhef, also on InterIX). Same tiers and same prices at both; flat rate, prices on the IP transit page. No 95th percentile, no commit, no overage invoice, no setup fee. The BGP session is free, IPv4 and IPv6, full table or default route. You pay one month at a time with no yearly contract, and a tunnel customer can move to a cross-connect later on the same agreement. Delivery is a cross-connect at the PoP or any tunnel your router can build: GRE, IPsec, WireGuard, VXLAN, L2TPv3, EoIP, OpenVPN or IPIP. Our upstreams include Hurricane Electric. Leased address space is fine when the IRR route object and the ROA name your ASN.

The catch is the one every flat port has: it is capped at the speed you buy. A 1 Gbit/s port will not burst to 1.5 Gbit/s the way a 10 Gbit/s metered port with a 1 Gbit/s commit would, so when your peak nears the ceiling you move to the 5 Gbit/s tier, a price step rather than a smooth slope. The other honest point is example A: a steady network that can sign a long contract for a low per-Mbps rate may pay less on metered transit than on our 1 Gbit/s port. Run the script with your real quote and our port price, and buy the smaller number. Two extras can still appear on a flat port, both from the building rather than from us: the data centre's cabling charge for a cross-connect at the PoP, and monthly transport if you want the hand-off at Telesmart, FINKI or Nikhef, quoted per order. Over a tunnel there is neither.

Networks in or near North Macedonia, Kosovo or Albania take the Skopje PoP (Prishtina to Skopje is about 3 ms on our network); Western European networks take the Amsterdam PoP; both together give two upstreams on one agreement.

Frequently asked questions

How does 95th percentile billing work?

The carrier samples your port's traffic every 5 minutes, in and out, and keeps the larger direction for each sample. At month end the samples are sorted, the top 5 percent (about 36 hours in a 30-day month) are discarded, and the next highest sample is your billable Mbps, multiplied by the agreed price per Mbps. A commit sets a minimum you pay regardless, with traffic above it billed at an overage rate.

How much does IP transit cost per Mbps?

It depends on port size, commit, term and city. TeleGeography recorded the lowest 10 GigE prices at $0.07 per Mbps a month and the lowest 100 GigE prices at $0.03 in Q2 2026, on large commits in the most competitive markets. A 1 Gbit/s commit at a single carrier costs much more per megabit; Hurricane Electric's public page starts at $200 a month. RS Computers sells flat-rate ports instead, prices on its IP transit page.

What is the difference between commit and burst?

The commit, or committed data rate, is the bandwidth you promise to pay for every month, billed even if unused, and it earns the lower per-Mbps rate. Burst is traffic above the commit, allowed because the physical port is larger, and billed per Mbps at an overage rate when your 95th percentile ends up above the commit.

Is flat-rate IP transit cheaper than 95th percentile?

For bursty traffic, usually yes: a network with a 4-hour evening peak is billed at that peak under the 95th percentile, while a flat port costs the same whatever the shape. For a steady network with a low long-term per-Mbps quote, metered transit can be cheaper. Compute both with your own traffic profile before choosing.

Does a DDoS attack increase my bandwidth bill?

On a 95th percentile contract, yes, once attack traffic in a month lasts longer than the roughly 36 hours that are discarded, unless the contract excludes attack traffic. On a flat-rate port the invoice does not change, although the attack can still saturate the port until it is filtered upstream.

What is the difference between IP transit and peering?

IP transit is a paid service that carries your traffic to and from the entire internet. Peering is a direct exchange of traffic with one other network, usually settlement-free, that only reaches that network and its customers. Peering lowers the amount of transit you pay for but cannot replace it.

Price it with your own traffic, then talk to us

Export your router's 5-minute in and out samples for last month, feed them into the script in place of the synthetic profiles, and you will know your real 95th percentile and what each model would have cost. Put our flat-rate port price from the IP transit page next to your best metered quote. If the flat port wins, or if what you want most is a bill that never surprises you, send your ASN, prefixes, port speed, PoP and delivery method on Telegram or to info@rscomputers-ks.com; a port in Skopje or Amsterdam is live in 2 to 4 hours once the route objects and ROAs check out.

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