We monitor latency to various cities around the world. This guide has details about the monitoring we provide and how you can use looking glasses to troubleshoot incoming international traffic, often useful for gamers or people who work remotely. We monitor latency daily and strive to be the Cape Town ISP with the lowest latency to important cities around the world.
🚦 Compare your latency #
If you are not currently an Atomic customer, you can use the looking glasses below to compare your current latency to Atomic’s latencies. If you need low international latency, join Atomic!
How to compare: have a look at our latency map to find the latency for the city you are interested in. Visit the looking glass for your chosen city (locations section below). Find the IP address we monitor and ping the related IP address. For example, testing your latency to Miami, run the command: ping 104.156.244.232
Meter.net has a browser-based city latency test, if you need a comprehensive international latency test.
🌍 Monitoring locations & latency #
- Johannesburg – 16ms
- Amsterdam – 145ms
- Frankfurt – 142ms
- London – 144ms
- Lisbon – 112ms
- Sao Paulo – 140ms
- Miami – 160ms
- New York – 190ms
- Toronto – 200ms
- Singapore – 170ms
- Tokyo – 196ms
Note: Latency figures are from Cape Town. Latencies can change over time. See our latency dashboard for a longer-term view.
⚡️ Atomic’s latency monitoring services #
- Live Latency Map (5-minute updates)
- City Latency Dashboard (15-minute updates)
- Telegram Alerts Channel – Notifications for latency changes
- Atomic Looking Glass – ipt1 and ipt2 will give you isolated latency by IP transit provider
- Important Latencies – JHB & LON, multiple monitoring locations, isolated by link / IPT provider
- Dashboard – Ripe Atlas Probes
📲 Incoming international traffic #
If you are experiencing high latency, packet loss, buffering or video call freezes from services in an international city, visit the looking glass for the city above and then traceroute to your current IP address. This will show you which IP transit providers the traffic passes through to reach you. If you spot a problem, please open a support ticket and include traceroutes and ping test results.
🎯 How to improve latency to an IP address #
The first step is to monitor the latency to an IP and understand the path the traffic takes in both directions. We can then try to optimse the path and/or arrange for better peering to be set up with the remote network. Optimising latency can take a few days. Getting extra peering configured usually takes a week.
6️⃣ IPv6 latency #
We often see that IPv4 latency is better than IPv6 to the same location. Some networks view IPv6 as less important. We monitor both, and we’ll always try to get IPv6 latency to match IPv4.
