Agents Week: Network Performance Update

Cloudflare compared performance across the world's 1,000 largest networks based on connection time. This metric most closely reflects the connection speed users actually experience, and rankings were calculated using trimean to mitigate variance and outliers.

Data was collected via Real User Measurements (RUM). When users see a Cloudflare error page, a small speed test runs in the background, measuring response times from multiple providers—including Cloudflare, Amazon CloudFront, Google, Fastly, and Akamai—in real browser environments.

Performance improvements came from two areas.

• Physical expansion: New PoPs were added in Constantine (Algeria), Malang (Indonesia), and Wroclaw (Poland), processing traffic closer to users.
• Software optimization: Processing time was reduced through HTTP/3 adoption, improved congestion window management, and more efficient CPU/memory usage in connection establishment, SSL/TLS termination, traffic management, and the core proxy.

The effects showed up in the numbers. In Wroclaw, average RTT for free users dropped from 19ms to 12ms, a 40% improvement, while in Malang, Enterprise traffic latency decreased from 39ms to 37ms.

As a result, Cloudflare became the fastest provider in 60% of top networks as of December 2025, up from 40% in September 2025. During this period, Cloudflare additionally secured the #1 spot in 40 countries, 261 networks, and 54 ASNs in the United States, and by December averages was 6ms faster than the next-fastest provider. Cloudflare stated it will continue closing the remaining gap to become the fastest provider across all networks.