It only matters whether the greater of the two directions is reduced, if you do 8gig out and 1gig in you get charged for 8gig out, even if you reduce 1g inbound to .925G. (also it's 95th percentile typically, but that shouldn't matter in this case)

It would cost more to do the refactoring than the ever could hope to recoup, even if shorter urls also decrease outbound traffic.

And I wonder, has he ever tried to do anything non default with oracle's equivalint: tnsnames.ora, listener.ora swlnet.ora etc.
The defaults have bad security holes, and changing things is pretty bad. They had a daemon in there who's *purpose* was to allow remote systems to execute programs without authentication for gods sake. You had to pay for encryption and it took highpriced dba to set it up (contrast with pretty simple SSL for opensource dbs)

SQLNet is *not* simple and out of the box is pretty freaking insecure.