Network performance update: Security Week 2024

How the Fastest Network Stacks Up Now

Since mid-2021, we have benchmarked our edge network against other major providers, focusing on the networks that matter most to end users. The key metric is 95th percentile TCP Connection Time—a measure of how quickly a connection can be established to a user, which directly affects perceived website speed. We define a “network” as a country and AS number pair, and we prioritize the networks with the most reported user traffic.

As of February 15, 2024, Cloudflare is the fastest provider for TCP Connection Time at the 95th percentile in 44% of the top 1000 networks worldwide. This is a significant lead over our closest competitor, Amazon CloudFront, which is fastest in 19% of those networks. In an additional 10% of networks, we are within 2 ms or 5% of the #1 provider.

Our P95 TCP Connection time has been steadily decreasing since November 2023. Day over day, we are consistently faster than CloudFront by roughly 50 ms at P95, and the gap widens considerably against other providers—nearly 200 ms faster than Akamai for global connect times. This consistency indicates that our network broadly reaches more locations, allowing users to retrieve content with lower latency.

When aggregated over the entire measurement period from November 18, 2023, to February 15, 2024, Cloudflare was the #1 provider in 73% of networks for mean TCP connection time.

A geographic view of P95 TCP connect times shows we are fastest in the majority of countries, with most of the map shaded in our color:

For comparison, this was the global picture a few months earlier, in September 2023:

Why Measurement Methodology Matters

We collect this data using Real User Measurements (RUM). When a user receives a Cloudflare-branded error page, the browser fetches a small file from Cloudflare, Akamai, Amazon CloudFront, Fastly, and Google Cloud CDN, reporting the performance of each provider from the end user’s network perspective. This approach gives us an accurate, ground-level view of where each provider is faster and where we have room to improve.

From this data, we evaluate several performance metrics, including TCP Connection Time, Time to First Byte (TTFB), and Time to Last Byte (TTLB).

A common pitfall of this kind of measurement is sample bias. If we only looked at networks that happen to report the most errors, a small network with a temporary problem could be weighted as heavily as a major regional provider. To avoid this, we fixed a list of the 1000 networks we want to analyze, based on public user population stats and our own sample sizes. This ensures that our day-over-day comparisons are always against the same set of networks, providing a stable, consistent signal.

The HTTP/3 Advantage

A significant factor in our performance leadership is our aggressive adoption of HTTP/3, which is currently used for around 31% of Internet traffic:

To quantify its impact, we compared two Cloudflare endpoints under identical test conditions—one with HTTP/3 enabled, and one with it disabled. The difference is stark:

At the 95th percentile, enabling HTTP/3 makes Cloudflare 116 ms faster for connection times.

The speedup comes from the underlying QUIC protocol. QUIC multiplexes UDP packets, allowing parallel data streams to be sent simultaneously. Crucially, this means TLS encryption can be performed in parallel with connection establishment, cutting the time needed to set up a secure connection. Since all major browsers support HTTP/3 by default, enabling it on your website can provide these latency reductions immediately.

Next Steps

Our ongoing efforts remain focused on the same core strategy: identifying where we are slower, making improvements, and sharing the results transparently. We continue to work toward the goal of being the fastest network in every market.