Cloudflare lands in Guam, cutting latency for a remote Pacific hub

Cloudflare's network expansion is driven by a simple goal: reducing the physical distance between users and the infrastructure serving them. This proximity improves performance and brings Zero Trust services closer to end users, whether they are accessing public APIs, websites, or internal applications. The company's presence in Hagatna, Guam, is the latest example of this strategy, targeting a region where the nearest data centers were previously thousands of kilometers away.

Geography and connectivity challenges

Guam's location presents a unique challenge. The island sits roughly 2,400 km from Tokyo and Manila, and about 6,100 km from Honolulu. Honolulu itself is the most remote major city in the US, with San Francisco as its closest major counterpart at 3,700 km away. These vast distances directly translate into high network latency for Guam’s residents, affecting the time it takes for data to travel between a user's device and a server.

Despite its remote location, the island is a connectivity hub in the region. Data shows multiple active submarine cables landing in Guam, linking it to Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, Australia, Indonesia, and Hawaii. This provides redundancy and resilience, mitigating the kind of total outage seen in Tonga in January 2022. Guam also serves as a crucial gateway for even more isolated locations like the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM) and the Marshall Islands, which depend on Guam for their extra hop to the broader internet. Palau relies on Guam as well but has alternative connections to the Philippines and Australia.

Peering at MARIIX

Cloudflare's presence in Guam is established through the Mariana Islands Internet Exchange (MARIIX). Through this exchange, Cloudflare can peer with and route traffic for local networks, or autonomous systems (ASs), including:

  • AS 395400 - University of Guam
  • AS 9246 - GTA Teleguam
  • AS 3605 - DoCoMo Pacific
  • AS 7131 - IT&E
  • AS 17456 - PDS

The onboarding of these participants is gradual, with AS 7131 being served from April 2022 and AS 9246 as the latest addition in July 2022. Downstream customers of these networks, such as AS 17893 (Palau National Communications Corp.) or AS 21996 (Guam Cell), can also leverage the new local deployment. This expands the performance benefit beyond Guam's roughly 171,000 residents to include populations in FSM (105,000) and the Marshall Islands (60,000). The physical installation was carried out with the local MARIIX staff, a process that ran smoothly despite the distances involved. The relatively small time zone difference from the Cloudflare office in Singapore eased coordination.

Measurable performance gains

Before this deployment, traffic from the region was routed via anycast to data centers in Tokyo or Seattle. This meant round trips of thousands of kilometers for local internet requests. Since the new servers became active in mid-July, traffic from AS 9246—previously served from Seattle—is now served from Guam. This shift produced immediate and significant results.

For AS 9246, the median eyeball TCP RTT dropped from 136.3ms to 9.3ms, a 93.2% reduction. The P90 metric saw a decrease from 188.7ms to 97.0ms, a 48.5% reduction. A comparison of the busy local hour (12h00-13h00 UTC) on July 14 versus the same hour on July 15 shows a similar trend, with the median eyeball TCP RTT falling from 146ms to 12ms. Considerations related to the island's physical location make this one of Cloudflare's deployments with the largest relative reduction in latency for local users.

Network traffic response

The performance improvements have also led to increased internet usage. HTTP requests in Guam have risen steadily since the data center was turned up in April, with a clearer increase after mid-April and another step up in mid-June. Comparing traffic data from March 8 and July 17 shows an 11.5% increase in requests. This pattern illustrates the established feedback loop: faster connections encourage users to do more online.