Cloudflare Backbone: A Fast Lane on the Busy Internet Highway

Cloudflare has built its own backbone network consisting of long-distance fiber optic cables connecting various data centers across North America, South America, Europe, and Asia. This dedicated network provides guaranteed capacity and consistent latency between locations, improving redundancy and reducing website loading times by up to 45%. The Cloudflare Backbone is a software-defined network that constantly calculates the performance of routes between various networks, adjusting routing preferences in real-time to make use of all available routes. By enabling this backbone, average response time improvements of up to 44% have been observed. This initiative allows Cloudflare to be located within 50 milliseconds of 95% of the Internet connected population and helps improve internet security, reliability, and performance.