A clearer picture of connection health

Speed remains the headline metric for selling Internet service, and national broadband plans often codify specific targets in policy. But download bandwidth alone fails to explain many common complaints: game lag, frozen video calls, or audio dropouts. Latency, jitter, and the difference between peak and typical throughput all shape what users actually experience — and in some cases, a nominally faster connection can feel worse than a slower one.

Cloudflare’s speed test tool, first launched in 2020 as the pandemic strained residential networks, lets individuals measure their own connection. Until now, however, the results lived in isolated snapshots that users could download or share. With the new Internet Quality page on Cloudflare Radar, those measurements gain an aggregated view: country-level and network-level (autonomous system, or AS) insights into bandwidth, latency, and jitter over time. The page is split into two perspectives:

  • Internet Quality Index (IQI) — an estimate of average Internet quality derived from measurements against a set of Cloudflare and third-party targets.
  • Connection Quality — peak, best-case connection characteristics from speed test results aggregated over the preceding 90 days.

Individual speed test numbers — and the aggregates derived from them — will not always match other speed test platforms. Differences arise from several factors: where test endpoints sit in geographic and network terms, the content being transferred, possible “rate boosting” by ISPs, and whether tests use one or multiple parallel connections. Infrequent testing by users who are diagnosing a problem or verifying their purchased plan also skews results. These same caveats apply across all speed test tools.

In April, Cloudflare announced a partnership with Measurement Lab (M-Lab), a nonprofit focused on delivering a representative view of Internet quality. M-Lab’s Network Diagnostic Tool records millions of samples daily. The collaboration makes speed test results available in a public, queryable repository, extending the data beyond Cloudflare’s own platforms.

Why download speed is only the beginning

Providers market peak download speeds, but everyday browsing often involves pulling multiple smaller files in parallel — a different pattern than a single large download that saturates the link. Upload bandwidth rarely gets the same advertising attention, yet it became a critical bottleneck when video conferencing surged in 2020, with multiple household members competing for the same upstream capacity.

Latency measures the round-trip time for a packet to travel from client to server and back, expressed in milliseconds. Lower is better. The impact is most visible in online gaming and video calls, but it also affects web page responsiveness. Latency can be measured under two conditions: loaded, when bandwidth is actively being consumed, and idle, when the connection has no other traffic. These terms are defined from the device’s perspective — unless a test runs directly from a router, it cannot see activity elsewhere on the network.

Jitter captures the variation between consecutive latency measurements, also under idle or loaded conditions. Lower jitter means more consistent performance, which matters for real-time applications like voice and video.

Two lenses, shared methodology

The IQI and Connection Quality sections draw on different data sources but share analytical principles.

IQI extends the benchmarking mechanism Cloudflare already uses to compare itself against other networks. It relies on end user measurements against Cloudflare and third-party targets, reflecting a modern Internet where content typically comes from distributed points of presence. By design, regions and providers dependent on international links — rather than local peering — will see weaker IQI scores. The index also favors traffic patterns typical of web browsing over heavy downloads, which biases results toward the latency-sensitive experience most users encounter.

For each metric and ASN, IQI calculates the 25th percentile, median, and 75th percentile at 15-minute intervals. At country level, those numbers are aggregated across the ASNs visible in that region, weighted by each network’s estimated user population. This weighting prevents networks that generate large amounts of automated traffic — but serve few actual end users — from skewing regional figures.

Connection Quality draws on results from the Cloudflare Speed Test, which measures against the nearest Cloudflare location from among the network’s presence in 285 cities worldwide. Unlike IQI’s percentile approach, Connection Quality first combines the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles into a single trimean per ASN. That calculation balances the connection quality most users actually experience with the best quality available from that network — recognizing that many subscribers do not choose the fastest available plan.

Results are aggregated over 90-day windows, in part to account for the varied reasons users run speed tests at different times. Cloudflare does not record personally identifiable information with test results. At country level, each ASN’s trimean is aggregated with the same user-population weighting used for IQI — reducing the influence of technicians who may test network performance in ways that do not reflect typical subscriber experience.

Three Levels of Internet Quality Data

The Internet Quality page is organized into three views: global, country-level, and autonomous system (AS). As with other Cloudflare Radar pages, the country and AS views expose identical data sets, differing only in aggregation level.

Global View

The worldwide view opens with time series graphs of Internet Quality Index (IQI) metrics aggregated by continent. A drop-down menu at the upper right controls the time window; at launch, only the trailing three months of data are available. Clicking a continent name in the legend removes it from the display for closer inspection of a particular region.

Below the time series, the Connection Quality section renders a choropleth map with countries shaded according to the chosen metric — speed, latency, or jitter — selected from a drop-down. Hovering over a country reveals its name and value; clicking navigates to that country's dedicated page. Unlike the IQI graphs, the Connection Quality map always reflects the previous 90 days of data.

Country-Level View

On a country page, IQI metrics for the selected time frame appear as time series showing median bandwidth, latency, and DNS response time. Each graph includes a shaded band bounded by the 25th and 75th percentiles, capturing the spread of expected user experience.

The Connection Quality section summarizes upload and download speeds, latency, and jitter over the preceding 90 days. A Performance Summary graph uses colored wedges to convey aggregate quality: an ideal connection exhibits large upload/download wedges and small latency/jitter wedges. Hovering reveals exact values, which also appear in an adjacent table.

Histograms below break out the distribution of bandwidth and latency/jitter measurements. If a speed histogram shows a prominent bar at 1 Gbps, or a latency/jitter histogram at 1000 ms, that bar represents measurements exceeding the histogram's maximum display value.

Autonomous System View

The upper-right corner of a country page lists its top five autonomous systems. Clicking an ASN opens that system's Performance page; a search bar at the top of the page can find any other AS by name or number. Graphs at the AS level match country-level visualizations but with a coarser scope. Users can identify their own ASN via the My Connection page on Radar.

What the Data Reveals

The IQI and Connection Quality visualizations surface patterns in connection characteristics and the effects of network disruptions. Several examples illustrate the utility of the data.

Connection Profiles by Technology

Verizon FiOS, a fiber-based residential service in the United States, offers symmetric plans at 300 Mbps, 500 Mbps, and "1 Gig" — the latter advertised at average wired speeds of 750-940 Mbps down / 750-880 Mbps up. Traffic rides on AS701, labeled "UUNET" after a historical acquisition. Its bandwidth histogram shows rough symmetry between upload and download speeds, unlike cable providers, whose upload speeds cluster at the low end while downloads span a wide range. Distinct peaks around 300 Mbps and 750 Mbps hint that the entry and top tiers are more popular than the middle plan. A tail of slower results reflects both non-FiOS traffic on the same ASN and the vagaries of in-home WiFi, which can undercut subscribed speeds.

Network Shutdowns Alter Latency

When Pakistan's government ordered mobile networks shut down on May 9, 2023, amid protests, fixed broadband networks absorbed displaced traffic. IQI latency data show the consequence: median latency fell roughly 25% as users moved from mobile to fixed connections. With mobile service restored on May 12, latency climbed back.

Bandwidth as an Early Warning

UK operator Virgin Media suffered brief outages on April 4, but its AS5089 IQI bandwidth graph hinted at trouble days earlier. Median bandwidth dropped from about 35 Mbps to around 23 Mbps before the outages struck, with reduced throughput persisting into April 5, consistent with published reports.

Submarine Cable Faults Diminish Quality

When Philippine provider PLDT announced on June 5 that a submarine cable partner had lost capacity, IQI graphs for AS9299 captured the shift beginning around 06:45 UTC. Median bandwidth halved from 17 Mbps to 8 Mbps while median latency rose 75%, from 37 ms to roughly 65 ms. The 75th percentile latency nearly tripled, from 63 ms to 180 ms.

Roadmap

Further Radar enhancements are planned, including finer geographic granularity (state and city levels), AIM scores to gauge quality for specific use cases, and integration of an open source speed test module directly into Radar. Users can meanwhile benchmark their own connections at speed.cloudflare.com, share findings with @CloudflareRadar, and explore data via the M-Lab repository or the Radar API.