It was just last month that we announced our network had grown to over 270 cities globally. Today, we’re announcing that with recent additions we’ve reached 275 cities. With each new city we add, we help make the Internet faster, more reliable, and more secure. In this post, we’ll talk about the cities we added, the performance increase, and look closely at our network expansion in India.

Here are the four new cities we added in the last month: Ahmedabad, India; Chandigarh, India; Jeddah, Saudi Arabia; and Yogyakarta, Indonesia.

India is home to one of the largest and most rapidly growing bases of digital consumers. Recognising this, Cloudflare has increased its footprint in India in order to optimize reachability to users within the country.

Cloudflare’s expansion in India is facilitated through interconnections with several of the largest Internet Service Providers (ISPs), mobile network providers and Internet Exchange points (IXPs). At present, we are directly connected to the major networks that account for more than 95% of the country’s broadband subscribers. We are continuously working to not only expand the interconnection capacity and locations with these networks, but also establish new connections to the networks that we have yet to interconnect with.

In 2020, we were served through seven cities in the country. Since then, we have added our network presence in another five cities, totaling to 12 cities in India. In the case of one of our biggest partners, with whom we interconnect in these 12 cities, Cloudflare’s latency performance is better in comparison to other major platforms, as shown in the chart below.

Response time (in ms) for the top network in India to Cloudflare and other platforms. Source: Cedexis

Every time we add a new location, we help make the Internet a little bit faster. The reason is every new location brings our content and services closer to the person (or machine) that requested them. Instead of driving 25 minutes to the grocery store, it’s like one opened in your neighborhood.

In the case of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, we already have six other locations in two different cities in Saudi Arabia. Still, by adding this new location, we were able to improve median performance (TCP RTT latency) by 26% from 81ms to 60ms. 20 milliseconds doesn’t sound like a lot, right? But this location is serving almost 10 million requests per day. That’s approximately 55 hours per day that someone (or something) wasn’t waiting for data.

As we continue to put dots on the map, we’ll keep putting updates here on how Internet performance is improving. As we like to say, we’re just getting started.

If you’re an ISP that is interested in hosting a Cloudflare cache to improve performance and reduce backhaul, get in touch on our Edge Partnership Program page. And if you’re a software, data, or network engineer – or just the type of person who is curious and wants to help make the Internet better – consider joining our team.

We have exciting news: Cloudflare closed out the decade by reaching our 200th city* across 90+ countries. Each new location increases the security, performance, and reliability of the 20-million-plus Internet properties on our network. Over the last quarter, we turned up seven data centers spanning from Chattogram, Bangladesh all the way to the Hawaiian Islands:

• Chattogram & Dhaka, Bangladesh. These data centers are our first in Bangladesh, ensuring that its 161 million residents will have a better experience on our network.

• Honolulu, Hawaii, USA. Honolulu is one of the most remote cities in the world; with our Honolulu data center up and running, Hawaiian visitors can be served 2,400 miles closer than ever before! Hawaii is a hub for many submarine cables in the Pacific, meaning that some Pacific Islands will also see significant improvements.

• Adelaide, Australia. Our 7th Australasian data center can be found “down under” in the capital of South Australia. Despite being Australia’s fifth-largest city, Adelaide is often overlooked for Australian interconnection. We, for one, are happy to establish a presence in it and its unique UTC+9:30 time zone!

• Thimphu, Bhutan. Bhutan is the seventh SAARC (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation) country with a Cloudflare network presence. Thimphu is our first Bhutanese data center, continuing our mission of security and performance for all.

• St George’s, Grenada. Our Grenadian data center is joining the Grenada Internet Exchange (GREX), the first non-profit Internet Exchange (IX) in the English-speaking Caribbean.

We’ve come a long way since our launch in 2010, moving from colocating in key Internet hubs to fanning out across the globe and partnering with local ISPs. This has allowed us to offer security, performance, and reliability to Internet users in all corners of the world. In addition to the 35 cities we added in 2019, we expanded our existing data centers behind-the-scenes. We believe there are a lot of opportunities to harness in 2020 as we look to bring our network and its edge-computing power closer and closer to everyone on the Internet.

*Includes cities where we have data centers with active Internet ports and those where we are configuring our servers to handle traffic for more customers (at the time of publishing).

Cloudflare has a rich history in EMEA where London was one of the earliest bases for both the company’s engineering and also its customer-facing activities. In the subsequent years, we have expanded our customer-facing activity to include coverage into all the major EMEA countries and regions. We’ve built up a team of professional sales and business development people, capable systems engineers, dedicated customer success managers, thoughtful marketeers and a responsive customer support team who serve our existing customers and develop new ones as a committed and focused team.

We work on developing brand awareness for Cloudflare and extending our reach into the market through communications, events and most of all through ongoing close engagement with customers, prospective customers and partners. We carry the Cloudflare mission of helping build a better Internet to the market and reinforce it every chance we get.

I’m a British-Canadian with more than 25 years experience growing international businesses, mostly in the Internet area with leading companies such as Cisco. I speak a little French and Japanese as a result of my travels and have a great appreciation for the rich cultures and incredible diversity that we have in the EMEA region. I see opportunity throughout EMEA and am excited to apply what I’ve learned to help Cloudflare expand and serve our customers here.

EMEA is a vast, diverse region encompassing approximately 120 countries across 3 continents with a huge variety of cultures, languages and backgrounds of its people. From large, influential countries like Germany, the United Kingdom and France to dynamic, innovative countries such as Sweden, Finland, and the Netherlands to fast-growing, emerging countries like Poland, the United Arab Emirates and South Africa there is a tremendous breadth of opportunity and demand for Cloudflare in these attractive and diverse markets.

Image courtesy of YourFreeTemplates

Our customers in EMEA are some of the most innovative and advanced in the world. Building on Cloudflare’s usual strengths around securing and making more performant our customers’ websites and digital assets, we are increasingly having new conversations with customers in their key areas of their innovation. For example, many companies in EMEA are at the forefront of the trend towards serverless computing and Cloudflare is enabling them on that path with Cloudflare Workers.  

Another area of focus is corporate security including identity and access management where Cloudflare Access is being deployed by a number of forward-looking organisations. Customers using additional network protocols such as UDP in the gaming industry and TCP in financial trading markets are leveraging Cloudflare’s Spectrum capability for enhanced security and network traffic handling. This exciting progress is leading our customers to enjoy increasing breadth of usage and strategic value from Cloudflare’s solutions.

On the security and privacy front, in the European market in particular, there is a strong focus on data privacy and GDPR (General Data Protection Regulations).  Cloudflare is closely engaged with policymakers at the European Union in Brussels to align with and influence these important policy developments.

Our customers continue to be from digital, online, born on the web/cloud sectors while increasingly we are also adding customers from more traditional corporate, and in many cases global, environments where Cloud-based services are seeing rapid adoption as these customers go through digital transformation. Multi-cloud is also an important theme in particular with larger customers who are diversifying away from a single Cloud provider. Cloudflare is well placed to serve customer needs around all these trends.

Here are a few of our exciting EMEA customer stories:  

• AO.com

• AllSaints

• AutoTrader

• Debijenkorf

• Eurovision

• Le Cab

• RTE

• All

London continues to be the base camp for our activities where we have a customer facing the team of approximately 100 people carrying out our activities supporting and developing customers. We have over 20 nationalities represented on the team and 29 and counting languages covered. It’s a diverse and committed team that is well aligned to the broad, diverse markets we serve. We represent a significant portion of Cloudflare’s business globally and are growing fast.

We’ve recently moved to a large new office space in a great location at London County Hall. In fact, we can see a number of our important customers in the UK public sector and corporate sector from our new office. We celebrated this new office opening with an event in April where our co-founders CEO Matthew Prince and COO Michelle Zatlyn both made the journey from San Francisco to co-host.  This new modern office space is well set up to receive existing and prospective customers as well as other key parties such as partners and developers in a professional and comfortable environment conveniently located in central London.

Alongside our customer-facing team in London is, of course, a significant portion of our global engineering team which is led by our CTO John Graham-Cumming. So, our customers and our employees benefit by having all elements of Cloudflare’s business from engineering to product management to all customers facing activities under one roof.

In 2018 we’ve added a second important customer-facing base in Munich, Germany to serve the Germany, Austria, and Switzerland (DACH) markets under the leadership of Stefan Henke. Our DACH team has been growing rapidly, approaching 20 people to support an exciting rate of new customer growth in the region.

We work with a number of committed channel partners throughout the region and are working to extend that cooperation while developing new partners such that we can best serve Cloudflare customers throughout the region. We’ve appointed a Head of EMEA Channel partnerships, Anwar Karzazi, who leads our team and activities building these partnerships in the region.  

The Cloudflare network is powered by data centers in over 180 cities around the world including 70+ in EMEA.  With our strong coverage In most parts of EMEA, we are typically able to process requests of our customers web site traffic very rapidly ensuring a great experience for their customers and visitors.

Our annual London Connect customer event is happening today at our County Hall location.  The event brings together our customers, prospective customers, partners, developers and other interested parties for a full day of information exchange and presentations focusing on the success our customers are having with Cloudflare solutions.   If you are already planning to attend, keep an eye on our Twitter account for schedule updates!

If you’re interested in exploring your career at Cloudflare, we are hiring in Europe and globally! Our team in London and in Munich is looking to expand across the region for roles including Account Executives, Business Development Representatives, Customer Success Engineering, Solutions Engineering, Technical Support, Network Engineering, Systems Reliability Engineering, Sales Operations and also in Product Development/Engineering and more. Check out our careers page to learn more!

I’m looking forward to helping Cloudflare grow substantially in EMEA in the coming years!

Thanks to everyone within Cloudflare who is helping us to build up a great EMEA business with the aim of serving our growing base of EMEA and global customers exceptionally well.  

If you are a Cloudflare customer in EMEA reading this, thank you and expect our continued innovation and commitment to you and your organisation. Thinking about becoming a customer? We’d love to have you with us. Our EMEA team looks forward to serving you and extending the value we bring to you in the future.

Cloudflare is excited to announce the addition of ten new data centers across the United States, Bahrain, Russia, Vietnam, Pakistan and France (Réunion). We're delighted to help improve the performance and security of over 12 million domains across these diverse countries that collectively represent about half a billion Internet users.

Our global network now spans 165 cities, with 46 new cities added just this year, and several dozen additional locations being actively worked on.

Our expansion begins in the United States, where Cloudflare's 36th and 37th data centers in the nation serve Charlotte (North Carolina) and Columbus (Ohio) respectively. They are promising markets for interconnection, and join our existing deployments in Ashburn, Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, McAllen, Memphis, Miami, Minneapolis, Montgomery, Nashville, Newark, Norfolk, Omaha, Philadelphia, Portland, Richmond, Sacramento, Salt Lake City, San Diego, San Jose, Seattle, St. Louis, Tallahassee, and Tampa.

Cloudflare's Manama (Bahrain) data center, our 158th globally, further expands our Middle East coverage. A growing hub for cloud computing, including public sector adoption (with the Kingdom's "Cloud First" policy), Bahrain is attracting talent and investment in innovative companies.

Cloudflare's new St. Petersburg deployment serves as a point of redundancy to our existing Moscow facility, while also expanding our surface area to withstand DDoS attacks and reducing latency for local Internet users. (Hint: If you live in Novosibirsk or other parts of Russia, stay tuned for upcoming Cloudflare deployments near you).

Hànội and Hồ Chí Minh City, the two most populated cities in Vietnam with an estimated population of 8 million and 9 million respectively, now host Cloudflare's 160th and 161st data center.

On November 19, 1997, the Internet officially became available in Vietnam. Since then, several telecommunication companies - including VNPT, FPT, Viettel, CMC, VDC, and NetNam - have played a critical role in integrating the use of Internet into the government systems, business environment, school facilities, and many other organizations. With our new data centers in place, we are delighted to help provide a faster and safer Internet experience.  

The world's sixth most populous country, Pakistan is a land of delicious food, breathtaking natural beauty, poetry and, of course cricket. Its natural beauty is exemplified by being the home of 5 out of 14 mountains which are at least 8,000m high, including K2, the second highest peak in the world. Pakistan's rich history includes the 5,000 year old lost civilization of Mohenjo-daro, with incredible design from complex architecture on a grid-layout to advanced water and sewage systems.

Nanga Parbat - Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported

Today, Cloudflare is unveiling three new data centers housed in Pakistan, one in each of the most populous cities - Karachi and Lahore - alongside an additional data center in the capital city, Islamabad. We are already seeing latency per request decrease by over 3x and as much as 150ms, and expect this to further improve as we tune routing for all our customers.

Latency from PTCL to Cloudflare customers reduces by over 3x across Pakistan. Courtesy: Cedexis

8,000 miles away, the final stop in today's expansion is Sainte-Marie in the Réunion island, the overseas department France off the coast of Magadascar (which can also expect some Cloudflare servers very soon!)

Even beyond these, we are working on at least six new cities in each of Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, and South America. Guess 20 upcoming locations to receive Cloudflare swag.

Cloudflare's newest data center is located in Baghdad, Iraq, in the region often known as the cradle of civilization. This expands our growing Middle East presence, while serving as our 45th data center in Asia, and 128th data center globally.

Even while accelerating over 7 million Internet properties, this deployment helps our effort to be closer to every Internet user. Previous, ISPs such as Earthlink were served from our Frankfurt data center. Nearly 40 million people live in Iraq.

One of the world's largest producers of the sweet date palm, Iraq's cuisine dates back over 10,000 years and includes favorites such as,

• Kleicha: Date-filled cookies flavored with cardamom, saffron and rose water

• Mezza: a selection of appetizers to begin the meal

• Iraqi Dolma: stuffed vegetables with a tangy sauce

• Iraqi Biryani: cooked rice with spices, beans, grilled nuts and meat / vegetables

• Masgouf: whole baked fish marinated in oil, salt, pepper, turmeric and tamarind

Baghdad is the first of eight deployments joining the Cloudflare global network just this week. Stay tuned!

This map reflects the network as of the publish date of this blog post. For the most up to date directory of locations please refer to our Network Map on the Cloudflare site.

We are very excited to announce Cloudflare’s 126th data center in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia (only hours after launching in Reykjavík!). This joins our existing Middle East facilities to provide even stronger coverage and resilience for over 7 million Internet properties across the region.

Our newest deployment was made possible in partnership with Zain, which now experiences reduced latency for every Internet user accessing every Internet facing application using Cloudflare. At least four additional Middle East deployments are already in the works.

Photo by Mohammed Alamri / Unsplash

Over 30 million people live in Saudi Arabia, which is also the 13th largest country by area at over 830,000 square miles. In 2020, alongside the launch of entirely new “economic cities”, we might witness the opening of the world’s tallest skyscraper at a staggering 1,000m height, located in Jeddah. More modestly, but in much less than two years from now, we also expect to place a Cloudflare data center there.

Saudi Arabia has an incredibly young demographic, as over half of the population is less than 25. Additional 4G LTE deployments, while also paving the way for 5G, should drive increased Internet usage.

Stay tuned as we continue to add new deployments in the Middle East, and around the world.

لبنان بلد تاريخي، موطن مدينتين من بين أقدم المدن في العالم. هناك مزيج كبير من التأثيرات من الشرق والغرب. كما أنه أصغر .بلد في آسيا القارية

CC-BY-SA Gregor Rom

Lebanon is a little different to most other countries when it comes to the internet, with all connectivity to the outside world flowing via a single network, Ogero. Traffic to Lebanon was previously served from our existing deployments in Marseille and Paris, due to where Ogero connects to the rest of the internet. By deploying locally in Beirut, round-trip latency is cut by around 50 milliseconds. This might seem like almost nothing, but it adds up when you factor in a DNS lookup and 3-way handshake required to open a TCP connection. Internet penetration in Lebanon according to different sources is around 75%, which is quite high. However, the speed available to end users is low, typically in single digit megabits per second.

The Ministry of Telecommunications has an ambitious plan to improve the connectivity available in Lebanon by 2020, a big part of this involves deploying fiber optic cabling to homes and businesses throughout the country. This will inevitably help to boost the level of traffic we see today coming from Lebanon. Comparing Lebanon to Denmark where the population is only a few thousand lower there is 7x more traffic served to Denmark than to Lebanon.

اتصال لبنان بالإنترنت

لبنان يختلف قليلا عن معظم البلدان الأخرى عندما يتعلق الأمر بالإنترنت، فكل اتصال إلى العالم الخارجي يتدفق عبر شبكة واحدة، أوجيرو. كانت حركة مرور الانترنت إلى لبنان في السابق من عمليات النشر الحالية لدينا في مرسيليا وباريس، ويرجع ذلك إلى حيث تتصل أوجيرو ببقية الإنترنت. من خلال النشر محليا في بيروت، أصبح وقت الإستجابة ذهابا وإيابا أقل من 50 ميلي ثانية واحدة.

قد يبدو هذا لا شيء تقريبا، لكنه يصبح ذو معنى عندما تحسب بحث نظام أسماء النطاقات (DNS) ومصافحة ثلاثية الطرق المطلوبة لفتح بروتوكول التحكم بالإرسال .(TCP) ويبلغ انتشار الإنترنت في لبنان وفقا لمصادر مختلفة حوالي ٧٥%، وهو رقم مرتفع جدا. ومع ذلك، فإن السرعة المتاحة للمستخدمين منخفضة، وعادة تكون رقم مفرد من الميغابتس في الثانية الواحدة.

قامت وزارة الاتصالات بعرض خطة طموحة لتحسين الاتصال المتوفر في لبنان بحلول عام ٢٠٢٠، جزء كبير من هذا ينطوي على نشر كابلات الألياف البصرية للمنازل والشركات في جميع أنحاء البلد. وهذا سيساعد حتما على تعزيز مستوى حركة المرور التي نراها اليوم قادمة من لبنان.وبمقارنة لبنان بالدانمرك حيث يبلغ عدد سكانه بضعة آلاف فقط أقل من لبنان، هناك ٧ أضعاف حركة المرور إلى الدنمارك أكثر من لبنان.

The Internet exchange in Beirut is no exception, with fibre access not possible in Lebanon, ISPs reach the IX by microwave. To give the best access from all around Beirut it is situated at the top of a hill. With most Internet exchanges, line of sight isn’t a concern as fibre is available. Our deployment connected to Beirut IX brings over 7 million websites closers to ISPs connected, making the Internet faster and safer for users in Lebanon.

(Beirut IX) تبادل الإنترنت في بيروت

إن تبادل الإنترنت في بيروت ليس استثناء، إذ لا يوجد صلة للالياف الضوئية في لبنان، فإن مزودي خدمة الإنترنت يصلون إلى نقطة تبادل الإنترنت (IX) عن طريق موجات الميكرويف. لإعطاء أفضل وصول من جميع أنحاء بيروت أنها تقع في أعلى تلة. مع معظم تبادلات الإنترنت، خط الأفق ليس مصدر قلق بما أن صلة الألياف متاحة.

إن نشرنا المتصل بتبادل الإنترنت (IX) في بيروت يجلب أكثر من ٧ ملايين موقع على شبكة الإنترنت، مما يجعل الإنترنت أسرع وأكثر أمانا للمستخدمين في لبنان.

Thank you to Layal Jebran for the translation.

CC BY-SA 2.0 image by Quinn Dombrowski

Two years ago, we previewed the relative cost of bandwidth that we see in different parts of the world. Bandwidth is the largest recurring cost of providing our service. Compared with Europe and North America, there were considerably higher Internet costs in Australia, Asia and Latin America. Even while bandwidth costs tend to trend down over time, driven by competition and decreases in the costs of underlying hardware, we thought it might be interesting to provide an update.

Since August 2014, we have tripled the number of our data centers from 28 to 86, with more to come. CloudFlare hardware is also deployed in new regions such as the Middle East and Africa. Our network spans multiple countries in each continent, and, sometimes, multiple cities in each country.

Traffic across 86 data centers in the CloudFlare network

There are approximately thirteen networks called “Tier 1 networks” (e.g., Telia, GTT, Tata, Cogent) who sell “transit” to access any of thousands of other networks on the Internet using their global backbones, including networks who are not their customers. We connect to networks by either purchasing transit from a global "Tier 1 network" (or major regional network), or by exchanging traffic directly with a carrier or ISP using “peering”. Typically, peered traffic is exchanged without settlement between the peered parties.

We try to make it as easy as possible for networks to interconnect with us. CloudFlare has an “open peering” policy, and participates at nearly 150 internet exchanges, more than any other company.

As a benchmark, let's assume the cost of transit in Europe and North America is 10 units (per Mbps). With that benchmark in place, without disclosing exact pricing, we can compare regions by transit cost, percentage of peering, and their effective blended cost (transit + peering).

Europe Transit vs Peering (Last 30 Days)

Based on our benchmark, the transit cost is 10 units. The region has a large number of Internet exchanges, typically non-profit, where we peer around 60% of our traffic. This makes for an effective regional cost of 4 units.

With perhaps the notable exception of the incumbent in Germany, many networks are supportive of open interconnection. CloudFlare already participates at 40 European internet exchanges, and is in the process of joining at least five more.

North America Transit vs Peering (Last 30 Days)

The cost of transit in North America is equal to the cost in Europe, or 10 units. We peer around 40% of our traffic, resulting in an effective regional cost of 6 units.

The level of peering in North America is less than in Europe, but a significant improvement over two years ago. The share of peered traffic is expected to grow. Some material changes have occurred and are occurring in the North American market, such as Frontier acquiring Verizon FiOS customers in three U.S. States and Charter preparing to merge with Time Warner Cable. We can see these changes making an impact to the regional interconnection landscape.

Notably, our peering has particularly grown in smaller regional locations, closer to the end visitor, leading to an improvement in performance. This could be through private peering, or via an interconnection point such as the Midwest Internet Cooperative Exchange (MICE) in Minneapolis.

Africa Transit vs Peering (Last 30 Days)

Transit prices in Africa are amongst the highest in the world at 14 times the benchmark or 140 units, with notable variance across the continent, from Cairo to Mombasa to Johannesburg. Fortunately, of the traffic that we are currently able to serve locally in Africa, we manage to peer about 90% (with a mix of carriers and ISPs), making for an effective cost of 14 units.

Our African deployments help us avoid the significant latency of serving websites from London, Paris or Marseille. A particularly promising but challenging region where we hope to deploy a CloudFlare data center is West Africa - specifically Nigeria, which is already at just under 100 million Internet users.

Middle East Transit vs Peering (Last 30 Days)

CloudFlare currently has four data centers in the Middle East, each of which are cache deployments with strategic ISP partners to serve their respective customers. We are able to peer all the traffic currently served from these data centers. While these collectively provide significant coverage, there is additional traffic (reaching Europe) that we would like to localize in the region. We hope that the remaining ISPs, such as Saudi Telecom Company, deploy similar caches, and enhance the performance of their customers.

Because we can peer 100% of our traffic in the Middle East, our effective pricing for bandwidth in the region is 0 units. There are, of course, other costs to delivering our service beyond bandwidth. However, by driving up peering rates in the Middle East we’ve been able to make our service in the Middle East extremely cost competitive.

Asia Transit vs Peering (Last 30 Days)

In Asia (excluding the Middle East), transit costs 7 times times the benchmark, or 70 units. However, we peer about 60% of our traffic, resulting in an effective cost of 28 units.

Beyond the major meeting points in Hong Kong, Singapore and Tokyo, a significant portion of our interconnection is localized to take place closer to visitors in cities such as Bangkok, Chennai, Kuala Lumpur, Mumbai, Osaka, New Delhi, Seoul, and Taipei. These statistics do not include our network of strategically located data centers inside of mainland China, where the dynamics of interconnection are entirely unique.

Two Asian locations stand out as being especially expensive: Seoul and Taipei. In these markets, with powerful incumbents (Korea Telecom and HiNet), transit costs 15x as much as in Europe or North America, or 150 units.

South Korea is perhaps the only country in the world where bandwidth costs are going up. This may be driven by new regulations from the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning, which mandate the commercial terms of domestic interconnection, based on predetermined “Tiers” of participating networks. This is contrary to the model in most parts of the world, where networks self-regulate, and often peer without settlement. The government even prescribes the rate at which prices should decrease per year (-7.5%), which is significantly slower than the annual drop in unit bandwidth costs elsewhere in the world. We are only able to peer 2% of our traffic in South Korea.

If you include HiNet and Korea Telecom in our blended bandwidth pricing, and take into account peering, our effective price is 28 units. If you exclude HiNet and Korea Telecom, our effective price is 14 units.

South America Transit vs Peering (Last 30 Days)

Transit prices in South America are very high, costing 17 times the benchmark, or 170 units. We peer about 60% of traffic in South America, making for an effective cost of 68 units.

One of the reasons that transit prices are high is that the Tier 1 networks which are newer entrants to this region have yet to pick up significant market share. While markets such as Brazil are less expensive and have greater peering, costs are highest in countries such as Peru and Argentina where, in each, a single incumbent provider, respectively Telefonica and Telecom Argentina, controls access for the last mile delivery of content to the majority of Internet users.

As we try to increase our share of peered traffic, one of the challenges we face is that many Internet exchanges (e.g., NAP Colombia) only permit domestically incorporated and licensed networks to publicly peer, or in another case, require a unanimous vote of all members on an IX to permit a new participant, effectively creating a separation between “international content” and “domestic content”.

If you include Telecom Argentina and Telefonica, our blended cost of bandwidth in South America is 68 units. If you exclude these two providers then our blended cost is 17 units.

Oceania Transit vs Peering (Last 30 Days)

Transit prices in Oceania (Australia and New Zealand) are lower than they used to be, but continue to be extremely high in relative terms, costing 17 times the benchmark from Europe, or 170 units. We peer 50% of our traffic, resulting in an effective cost of 85 units.

If you exclude Optus and Telstra, then the price falls to 17 units — because we peer with nearly everyone else.

Relative Cost of Bandwidth

CloudFlare has always optimized where we serve customers to take into account our effective costs. If you are a free customer using an excessive amount of expensive transit, we would serve you from fewer regions. The good news is that, over the last five years, we’ve been able to negotiate reasonable transit pricing or settlement-free peering with the vast majority of the world’s networks. That allows us to continue to provide the free version of our service as well as to keep prices low for all our paid services.

Today, however, there are six expensive networks (HiNet, Korea Telecom, Optus, Telecom Argentina, Telefonica, Telstra) that are more than an order of magnitude more expensive than other bandwidth providers around the globe and refuse to discuss local peering relationships. To give you a sense, these six networks represent less than 6% of the traffic but nearly 50% of our bandwidth costs.

While we’ve tried to engage all these providers to reduce their extremely high costs and ensure that even our Free customers can be served across their networks, we’ve hit an impasse. To that end, unfortunately, we’ve made the decision that the only thing that will change these providers’ pricing is to make it clear how out of step they are with the rest of the world. To demonstrate this, we’ve moved our Free customers off these six transit providers. Free customers will still be accessible across our network and served from another regional cache with more reasonable bandwidth pricing.

Ironically, this actually increases the cost to several of these providers because they now need to backhaul traffic to another CloudFlare data center and pay more in the process. For instance, if Telstra were to peer with CloudFlare then they would only have to move traffic over about 30 meters of fiber optic cable between our adjoining cages in the same data center. Now Telstra will need to backhaul traffic to Free customers to Los Angeles or Singapore over expensive undersea cables. Their behavior is irrational in any competitive market and so it is not a surprise that each of these providers is a relative monopolist in their home market.

If you’re a Free CloudFlare customer who cares about optimizing the best possible performance from one of these six providers then we encourage you to reach out to them and encourage them to follow a core principle of a free and open Internet and not abuse their monopoly position. We are committed to serving all our customers across every network that peers with us. To that end, help us convince these six networks to be on the right side of a free and open Internet by reaching out to your ISP.

• Ask HiNet to peer with CloudFlare in Taipei

• Ask Korea Telecom to peer with CloudFlare in Seoul

• Ask Optus to peer with CloudFlare across Australia

• Ask Telecom Argentina to peer with CloudFlare in Buenos Aires

• Ask Telefonica to peer with CloudFlare across South America

• Ask Telstra to peer with CloudFlare across Australia

We’ll post updates as we negotiate with these six networks and are hopeful that we’ll soon be able to serve all our customers across all the networks we interconnect with.

Our last embarkation into a new geography coincided with a significant milestone: our 30th data center (and first in Africa) in Johannesburg, South Africa. And as we march past number 40, we’re proud to announce yet another. Introducing CloudFlare’s latest points of presence (PoPs) in Doha, Qatar; Dubai, United Arab Emirates; Kuwait City, Kuwait; and Muscat, Oman. These data centers are the first wave in our MENA (Middle East/North Africa) expansion, and the 39th, 40th, 41st and 42nd data centers, respectively, to join our global network.

Up to this point all CloudFlare traffic delivered to the MENA region was served from our London, Frankfurt, Marseille, Paris and/or Singapore data centers, with round trip latency of up to 200-350ms. As in Africa, local bandwidth in MENA is notoriously expensive making it cost prohibitive to deliver content locally. That is (once again), until now! We're proud to announce the first of a series of agreements with regional carriers including Etisalat, Omantel, Ooredoo, and Zain to help build a better Internet in the region.

A few of the necessary ingredients to build a better Internet include international connectivity (often in the form of submarine cable systems) that connect to national backbones which, in turn, deliver the Internet to the access networks that bridge the last mile to Internet users themselves—all of which must be in place and optimally utilized to meet increasing demand in the most cost effective way. Fortunately, in the MENA region, there is already good international connectivity, with the vast majority of Internet traffic transferred internationally through submarine cables (something we referenced in our Marseille blog post), and substantial investments already made into national backbones and last mile infrastructure (e.g. broadband and mobile networks) to the end user.

All MENA countries are connected with at least two submarine cables; the UAE alone has 15+!

The problem is that the international submarine cables built in the region were designed to link individual countries in MENA with Europe and Asia, and not to provide regional connectivity within MENA. The number of undersea cables that pass through the region without interconnection is staggering. Consequently, there is patchy submarine connectivity between the Middle Eastern parts and the North African parts of MENA (with Egypt playing a pivotal role). What this means for CloudFlare (and you) is that it takes a lot of individual PoPs to achieve broad, local coverage of broadband and mobile users in the region. It is for this reason that we’ve announced a record setting four new PoPs deployed in a single month, with even more on the way.

An additional complexity is that, even with all of the right infrastructure related ingredients, the majority of Internet content accessed in MENA is hosted far far away in North America, Europe and Asia. That is, of course, unless you are a CloudFlare user. As of now, the collective content of all 2 million+ CloudFlare users is locally accessible through the networks of our partners in the region. No additional configuration required. This re-routing of traffic is now automatically in effect for all CloudFlare users worldwide.

As the latency measurements below demonstrate, our data centers across the Middle East are already delivering significant performance improvement. In the United Arab Emirates, latency has decreased from as high as 200ms to the closest CloudFlare PoP to 10ms, a 20x improvement.

In Qatar (just in time for the upcoming World Cup) latency to Ooredoo (the incumbent operator) has decreased from 150ms to 1ms (a 150x improvement!).

The benefits also extend to some other countries and networks in the region. Latency to networks in Saudi Arabia, for example, have seen latency decline from 200-150ms to less than 50ms (a 4x improvement).

Source: Measurements from RIPE Atlas

As a whole, our first wave of MENA deployments serve traffic originating not only from Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, but also traffic from networks in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iran, Pakistan and the Sudan, among others. Additional PoPs are in the works to expand and amplify these benefits throughout the region.

If you are curious about how this network expansion can help your organization, get in touch with our team.

P.S. No castle was touched within the deployment of these PoPs; keep guessing! We still don't have a winner in our contest announced here.

_Map source: Undersea Cable Map of the Middle East from Greg's Cable Map._

The conflict that is going on right now may be the first true cyberwar. While previous conflicts have included the use of cyber attacks by one side or the other, in this case supporters of both sides appear to be launching cyber offensives. At CloudFlare, we've been caught in the cross fire. That's allowed us a unique vantage point to report on what we're seeing.

We've been following news about the conflict and monitoring the attacks against sites on both sides for the last week. On November 21, 2012 at 19:00 (GMT) a ceasefire was announced. The large scale physical attacks appear to have largely stopped along with the ceasefire. We wanted to see what happened to cyber attacks.

Quite the opposite of stopping, there was a significant increase in cyber attacks against both sides websites that coincided with the ceasefire. The following chart aggregates data from a number of sites on both sides of the conflict. The dotted line about 3/4 of the way along the timeline indicates the point of time the ceasefire was declared. We have intentionally obscured whether the attacks were targeting sites supporting Israel or Palestine, but I can say that we saw significant upticks in attacks targeting both sides in the conflict.

This graph focuses specifically on what are known as Layer 7 attacks. These are application-layer attacks, and different than some of the Layer 3/4 attacks we have discussed before. Layer 7 attacks tend to be smaller in volume but often harder to defend against using traditional DDoS scrubbing services. CloudFlare's service is able to absorb these attacks and ensure that only legitimate requests are sent to a web server.

It is important to be clear. Nothing we've seen allows us to make a claim toward the attribution of the source of these attacks. CloudFlare's network is like a flack jacket, not like a machine gun. We shield sites from the attacks we see, but we don't spend a lot of time trying to determine the motives of the attackers. It is not correct to say that this data proves one side is attacking the other. In fact, third party organizations like Anonymous, which are not directly affiliated with Palestinians, have claimed responsibility for many of the attacks targeting Israeli sites, and several "vigilante hackers," who are not directly affiliated with Israel, have claimed responsibilityfor attacks against some Palestinian sites.

We've received criticism from supporters on both sides asking how we can be supporting the other. To be clear, we are not supporting either side. Resolving the difficult political questions of a conflict like this is way above our pay grade. We are proud, however, that in spite of withering cyber attacks CloudFlare has kept both sides' websites online.

The Internet is one of the greatest inventions in human history because it allows anyone to reach a global audience. CloudFlare's goal is to power a better Internet. While that will inherently mean we will increasingly find ourselves in difficult situations like this one, we will continue to be guided by the principle that it is not our role to decide whether one idea or another is correct, but instead to ensure that all ideas can find equal footing online.