China’s Internet architecture differs from the rest of the world. There are three major internet service providers (ISPs) that control the network inside of China—China Telecom, China Unicom, China Mobile. Due to limited interconnection (peering) between their networks, there is frequently congestion, which results in high latency and packet loss. Even within an ISP’s network across China (for example, China Telecom in Beijing and China Telecom in Guangzhou), the quality of the network can vary significantly. Thus, to optimize delivery of content throughout China, it’s important to have geographically dispersed data centers across China, and connectivity to the major ISPs in each region, which is what our China Service offers to our customers.

Cloudflare customers can turn on the China Network with a few clicks in their existing Cloudflare account, and without a single line of code change, enable their visitors within China to be served from data centers inside of China while visitors outside of China will still be served from the nearest Cloudflare data center. The result is shaving off seconds of latency for your China traffic. To illustrate the impact on your visitors’ experience, let’s assume one unique user makes 100 requests per session, you have 50,000 unique visitors per day, and turning on Cloudflare’s China Service reduces 200ms of latency: