</a>
</div>
<p>It’s happened to all of us — you casually click on a site, and suddenly you’ve reached a Cloudflare-branded error page. While you are shaking your fist at the sky, something interesting is happening on the back end. Cloudflare is using <a href="https://www.w3.org/TR/user-timing/"><u>Real User Monitoring (RUM)</u></a> to collect the data used to compare our performance against other networks. The monitoring we do is slightly different than the <a href="https://www.cloudflare.com/application-services/solutions/app-performance-monitoring/"><u>RUM Cloudflare offers</u></a> to customers. When the error page loads, a 100 KB file is fetched and loaded. This file is hosted on networks like Cloudflare, Akamai, Amazon CloudFront, Fastly, and Google Cloud CDN. Your browser processes the performance data, and sends it to Cloudflare, where we use it to get a clear view of how these different networks stack up in terms of speed. </p><p>We’ve been collecting and refining this data since June 2021. You can read more about how we collect that data <a href="https://blog.cloudflare.com/benchmarking-edge-network-performance/"><u>here</u></a>, and we regularly <a href="https://blog.cloudflare.com/tag/network-performance-update/"><u>track our performance</u></a> during Innovation Weeks to hold ourselves accountable to you that we are always in pursuit of being the fastest network in the world.</p>
<div>
<h2>How are we doing?</h2>
<a href="#how-are-we-doing">
</a>
</div>
<p>In order to evaluate Cloudflare’s speed relative to others, we measure performance across the top 1000 “eyeball” networks using the list provided by the <a href="https://stats.labs.apnic.net/cgi-bin/aspop?c=IN"><u>Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC)</u></a>. So-called “eyeball” networks are those with a large concentration of subscribers/end users. This information is important, because it gives us signals for where we can expand our presence or peering, or optimize our traffic engineering. When benchmarking, we assess the 95th percentile TCP connection time. This is the time it takes a user to establish a TCP connection to the server they are trying to reach. This metric helps us illustrate how Cloudflare’s network makes your traffic faster by serving your customers as locally as possible. </p><p>When we look at Cloudflare’s performance across the top 1000 networks, we can see that we’re fastest in 487, or over 48%, of these networks, between November 2024 and March 2025:</p>
<figure>
<img src="https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/2vkfABpKwZtd7FJf5BU4lz/c2a778435be9b2c47656753cdb39e8f0/1.png" />
</figure><p>In <a href="https://blog.cloudflare.com/network-performance-update-birthday-week-2024/"><u>September 2024</u></a>, we ranked #1 in 44% of these networks:</p>
<figure>
<img src="https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/105vHx9riLNO4Fgm5XvxnL/4b7d106b84d90bcc674c3fb54043593c/2.png" />
</figure><p>So why did we jump? To get a better understanding of why, let’s take a look at the countries where we improved, which will give us a better sense of where to dive in. This is what our network map looked like in <a href="https://blog.cloudflare.com/network-performance-update-birthday-week-2024/"><u>September 2024</u></a> (grey countries mean we do not have enough data or users to derive insights):</p>
<figure>
<img src="https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/5IfSvKcdYDsTE2Rl2WPLpE/1814ef571b8622c83ff6817b41102cf5/3.png" />
</figure><p>(September 2024)</p><p>Today, using those same 95th percentile TCP connect times, we rank #1 in 48% of networks and the network map looks like this:</p>
<figure>
<img src="https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/xYWPvT0dQH7eCxbqNSrqv/e758b2961faad0cd5e1d1d6a72351131/4.png" />
</figure><p>(March 2025)</p><p>We made most of our gains in Africa, where countries that previously didn’t have enough samples saw an increase in samples, and Cloudflare pulled ahead. This could mean that there was either an increase in Cloudflare users, or an increase in error pages shown. These countries got faster almost exclusively due to the presence of our <a href="https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-cloudflare-helps-next-generation-markets/"><u>Edge Partner deployments</u></a>, which are Cloudflare locations embedded in last mile networks. In next-generation markets like many African countries, these locations are crucial towards being faster as connectivity to end users tends to fall back to places like South Africa or London if in-country peering does not exist.</p><p>But let’s take a look at a couple of other places and see why we got faster.</p><p>In Canada, we were not the fastest in September 2024, but we are the fastest today. Today, we are the fastest in 40% of networks, which is the most out of all of our competitors:</p>
<figure>
<img src="https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/6bWdN0wG9g1LhujV4lY5Ne/5cdaa76a27cacc487622c45ab0ea38cd/5.png" />
</figure><p>But when you look at the overall country numbers, we see that the race for the fastest network is quite close:</p><div>
<figure>
<table>
<colgroup>
<col></col>
<col></col>
<col></col>
<col></col>
</colgroup>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
<p><span><span><strong>Canada 95th Percentile TCP Connect Time by Provider</strong></span></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p><span><span><strong>Rank</strong></span></span></p>
</td>
<td>
<p><span><span><strong>Entity</strong></span></span></p>
</td>
<td>
<p><span><span><strong>Connect Time (P95)</strong></span></span></p>
</td>
<td>
<p><span><span><strong>#1 Diff</strong></span></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p><span><span>1</span></span></p>
</td>
<td>
<p><span><span>Cloudflare</span></span></p>
</td>
<td>
<p><span><span>179 ms</span></span></p>
</td>
<td>
<p><span><span>-</span></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p><span><span>2</span></span></p>
</td>
<td>
<p><span><span>Fastly</span></span></p>
</td>
<td>
<p><span><span>180 ms</span></span></p>
</td>
<td>
<p><span><span>+0.48% (+0.87 ms)</span></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p><span><span>3</span></span></p>
</td>
<td>
<p><span><span>Google</span></span></p>
</td>
<td>
<p><span><span>180 ms</span></span></p>
</td>
<td>
<p><span><span>+0.74% (+1.32 ms)</span></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p><span><span>4</span></span></p>
</td>
<td>
<p><span><span>CloudFront</span></span></p>
</td>
<td>
<p><span><span>182 ms</span></span></p>
</td>
<td>
<p><span><span>+1.74% (+3.11 ms)</span></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p><span><span>5</span></span></p>
</td>
<td>
<p><span><span>Akamai</span></span></p>
</td>
<td>
<p><span><span>215 ms </span></span></p>
</td>
<td>
<p><span><span>+20% (+36 ms)</span></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</figure>