Definition of 95th Percentile Bandwith Measurement Process

The “95th Percentile Method” of measuring bandwidth samples a reading of the amount of bandwidth in use on a client’s provisioned gateway interface (most often a switch port in our data center) every 3 minutes 24×7.

At the end of the month, those readings are sorted from lowest to highest. The highest 5% are discarded, and the next lowest number is the billable 95th percentile reading for that month’s bandwidth usage.

This method is used when calculating bandwidth utilization on Internet connections or servers in the data center. This is a commonly used method by most carriers and data centers, and is used to calculate network utilization for billing purposes.