How Edge Network Performance Improved Ahead of Security Week
Cloudflare’s benchmarking of last-mile network performance has been running for about a year. The original tests covered TCP connection time, time to first byte, and time to last byte across a wide range of networks, with Cloudflare coming out fastest in 49% of networks worldwide. The company set a goal to increase that figure by 10% each Innovation Week. The latest data, released during Security Week, shows Cloudflare is now the fastest provider in 71% of the top 1,000 most reported networks globally.
The measurements rely on Real User Measurements (RUM), where users fetch a 100kb file from several providers. The aggregated results give a picture of where each provider leads and where Cloudflare still trails. After Full Stack Week, the data showed 596 country/network pairs where Cloudflare was more than 100ms behind the leader. The work since then has focused on diagnosing those cases and closing the gap.
Fixing Congestion for a Magic Transit Customer
One example involves a Magic Transit customer dealing with congestion in Canada. The root cause was insufficient peering at key interconnection points. When point-to-point connections run out of bandwidth, excess traffic gets routed over Internet Exchanges that are not on the optimal path, which increases latency. For end users, this degradation shows up as lag in games, buffering in video streams, and dropped calls in VoIP applications.
Cloudflare’s short-term fix was to spread traffic away from the congested points, removing the suboptimal hairpins and restoring service quality for the customer’s users. Then Cloudflare accelerated upgrades to its Internet Exchange ports across Canada to add capacity, even though the congestion was not on Cloudflare’s own network. Finally, Cloudflare set up direct peering with the customer’s provider in Canada, providing a shorter interconnection path close to the customer.
Removing a Hairpin in Australia
Another network in Australia was suffering because its users’ traffic left the country before reaching Cloudflare. This network hairpin increased connection times and made Cloudflare one of the slower providers for that network in the region. The fix was to establish peering with the network in Sydney, allowing traffic to stay within Australia. Connection time dropped from 65ms to 45ms, and Cloudflare became the number one provider for that network locally.
Progress Since Full Stack Week
The cumulative effect of these and other optimizations is visible in the rankings. The Full Stack Week data from November 2021 shows how many of the top 1,000 networks each provider leads in p95 TCP connection time, which measures the time to establish a connection.
As of Security Week in March 2022, Cloudflare has improved its position in 19 additional networks.
A country-level view shows similar gains. The Full Stack Week map displays the fastest provider in each country using the same data.
The Security Week map reflects the latest results.
Cloudflare is now number one across all of South America, in more countries in Africa, in the UK, Sweden, and Iceland, and in additional countries in the Asia Pacific region.
Speed as a Foundation for Security Products
The network improvements are not just about raw performance metrics. Security products often carry a reputation for slowing down traffic, but Cloudflare’s security offerings run on the same infrastructure that has been getting faster in these benchmarks. As the network continues to improve, the security products built on top of it inherit those gains. The goal remains to be the fastest network everywhere, and the Security Week announcements are built on that foundation.
