How Cloudflare helps next-generation markets

What makes a market "next-generation"?

The Internet has no borders. It doesn’t require a passport, and it isn’t tied to a single language. For anyone with a connected device, it’s the gateway to global information and services. Part of Cloudflare’s mission is ensuring that this experience is strong everywhere — including places we call next-generation markets.

These markets aren’t defined by traditional economic classifications like those from the IMF or World Bank. Instead, they’re defined by how people actually use the Internet. While North American and European users split their time between desktops and phones, users in next-generation markets rely on mobile devices for more than 50% of their traffic — sometimes as much as 80%. Examples include China, India, Indonesia, Thailand, and countries across Africa and the Middle East.

This mobile-heavy usage shapes both traffic patterns and application development. A larger share of mobile usage correlates with higher adoption of HTTP/S, which is used for 88% of Internet traffic overall. In regions like Africa and APJC, HTTP/S dominates even more strongly. North America, by contrast, still carries a meaningful share of traffic over older protocols like SMTP, FTP, or RTMP.

Application developers have noticed. Regional services like the marketplace Carousell and the ticketing platform BookMyShow are built around mobile and app-based users. Global platforms like Instagram and TikTok don’t offer full desktop experiences at all. These are mobile-first ecosystems, and they have different needs than desktop-centric ones.

What users and builders both need

In next-generation markets, both end users and application developers share a common goal: speed. But speed has different meanings for each group, and the challenges are amplified over mobile networks.

Users care about the experience they observe: real-time interaction with apps and sites. But mobile networks tend to have higher latency, more packet loss, and lower bandwidth than wired connections. Another obstacle is geography. In these regions, the path between a user and a distant server often involves long, indirect routes across the Internet.

A useful analogy is a game of telephone across a park. If there are enough people in the chain, the message arrives intact. But when you halve the number of people, each one has to shout twice as far — and errors creep in. When a receiver misses a message, they ask for a retransmission, which reduces how much data can flow at once.

Retransmission rates are driven by packet loss, which stems from poor signal transmission or errors along the network path. When loss occurs, protocols like TCP shrink the congestion window — the amount of data sent at one time — in a process called backoff. The window shrinks exponentially upon detecting loss, then recovers linearly. For users on unstable mobile connections, this behavior can make applications feel sluggish and unreliable.

Getting physically closer to users

For mobile users in next-generation markets, distance from servers is a major performance factor. Radio wave interference already makes mobile connections unstable, and local infrastructure challenges — like power grids that can't support large radio towers — can worsen the problem. On top of that, many networks in these regions can't reach dense peering points locally, so they route traffic through hubs like Frankfurt, London, or Singapore to interconnect with the rest of the Internet.

The result is that requests for content — especially cacheable content that doesn’t change often — travel across oceans, accumulating latency, congestion, and packet loss along the way. The performance penalty is especially visible in TLS handshakes, which require a three-way exchange between user and server before any data flows. The farther apart they are, the longer that handshake takes.

Cloudflare’s Edge Partner Program (EPP) addresses this by embedding Cloudflare nodes directly inside ISP networks. When a node lives in an ISP’s infrastructure, the physical distance between the user and Cloudflare shrinks substantially. Over the past four years, 80% of Cloudflare’s 107 new city deployments have been in next-generation markets, improving both cached and dynamic content performance.

Close proximity also enables smarter routing. Argo Smart Routing uses Cloudflare’s network intelligence to steer traffic more efficiently, improving dynamic and uncached content performance by over 30% on average.

Saudi Arabia’s deployment shows the impact

Saudi Arabia is a good case study for the Edge Partner Program. Previously, the nearest Cloudflare peering point for many networks there was in Frankfurt — more than 5,300 km from Riyadh. By deploying Cloudflare hardware inside the mobile operator Mobily, with three sites in Dammam, Riyadh, and Jeddah, the median round-trip time (RTT) for Mobily users improved by over 50%.

Before the deployment, the median RTT was 131ms. Afterward, that figure became roughly the 85th percentile — meaning that previously, one in two requests took longer than 131ms, while now, 85% of requests complete faster than that. The shorter path also reduces retransmission rates. Comparing traffic into a large data center in Los Angeles with the new site in Jeddah shows a clear contrast: connections into Los Angeles from around the world carry a high and variable retransmission rate, while users in Jeddah experience a much lower, more consistent rate. By terminating connections close to the device, the number of hops over unreliable paths drops, so initial requests are more likely to succeed on the first try.

For end users in next-generation markets, fewer hops and lower RTT mean less congestion and a more stable, responsive Internet experience. For the developers building applications for those users, local presence from a partner like Cloudflare makes it easier to deploy services geographically close to the people who use them.

Privacy and performance with WARP

Cloudflare WARP provides a privacy-preserving, high-performance path to the Internet for users everywhere. Adoption in next-generation markets has been particularly strong, as shown by year-to-date WARP downloads from the Apple App Store:

Recent updates have extended WARP support to more Edge Partner locations, delivering faster and more private connections in those regions. In many next-generation networks, WARP users connect to Cloudflare at the same location as their ISP before routing to the wider Internet. If the destination site is also protected by Cloudflare, the connection benefits from a fast end-to-end path. Otherwise, traffic still exits through Cloudflare, preserving user privacy throughout the session.

Closing the performance gap for regional developers

Consider an app developer in Muscat, Oman, building a shopping app for the local market. To compete with global incumbents, the app must offer a real-time browsing experience on par with—or better than—established competitors. If a global app loads faster in the region than a local alternative, the local offering's other advantages matter little.

Incumbent applications often underperform in next-generation markets because they host on cloud providers with limited regional presence. Users in the APJC region, for instance, frequently see traffic routed to Hong Kong, Singapore, or even Los Angeles as the closest cloud datacenter. A regional competitor that keeps its application local can turn this into a decisive advantage, offering a specialized experience that is inherently faster for local users.

That said, cost pressures often push developers away from local hosting. While some cloud providers do offer in-region datacenters, startup and smaller businesses in these markets frequently choose farther, cheaper locations. Middle East developers, for example, can reduce monthly data transfer costs by 30% or more by hosting in Frankfurt instead of locally. This forces a constant tradeoff between cost optimization and user experience, even for developers already leveraging local peering through the Edge Partner Program.

Running applications where users are

Cloudflare's developer platform removes the need to choose between cost and performance by letting applications run where their users are. In Saudi Arabia, Mobily subscribers already get traffic terminated locally in Jeddah. End-to-end performance is improved when Cloudflare finds the fastest path—Argo Smart Routing can cut Time to First Byte by 30% even when traffic must leave the country. But ideally, users would never need to leave Jeddah at all.

Moving application compute onto Cloudflare pushes more of the workload into datacenters in next-generation markets, giving users an in-country experience. Comparison data from Cloudflare's Developer Week tests shows the advantage for P95 TCP connection time over AWS Lambda@Edge, particularly in Africa and Asia where Workers is roughly 3x faster:

95th percentile TCP connect time (ms)

Operations running on Cloudflare execute closer to the user, improving end-to-end performance. Lambda@Edge scenarios already route through AWS edge locations, but any compute that must reach deeper into AWS infrastructure travels even farther. Cloudflare's model allows an entire application to run locally to its end users, helping next-generation markets get the same world-class performance as anywhere else.

A faster, more private Internet everywhere

Cloudflare's combination of faster connectivity, privacy-preserving tools, and a distributed developer platform helps close the gap between next-generation markets and the rest of the world. The Edge Partner Program brings applications closer to users, and the developer platform ensures those applications perform at a world-class level. Developers ready to build on this platform can start with Workers; network operators interested in bringing Cloudflare into their infrastructure can explore the Edge Partner Program.

Users in next-generation markets represent the future of the Internet, and their expectations will shape how online experiences are delivered. Cloudflare is positioned to help these users and the developers serving them get the experience they deserve.