We monitor latency to various cities around the world. This guide has details about the monitoring we provide and how you can use a looking glass to troubleshoot international traffic, often useful for gamers or people who work remotely.
🚦 Compare your latency #
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 (links in cities 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.
🌍 Cities & latency (ms) #
- Johannesburg 16 – 25
- London 140 – 155
- Amsterdam 145 – 152
- Frankfurt 142 – 150
- Lisbon 112 – 122
- Sao Paulo 140 – 150
- Miami 160 – 170
- New York 190 – 210
- Toronto 200 – 220
- San Francisco 230 – 250
- Singapore 170 – 220
- Tokyo 200 – 220
We list a latency range above. Optimal latency: as good as we’ve seen in the past. High latency: above this value is when our latency dashboard will show a problem (turn red) – usually about 10% more than optimal.
Latency figures are from our Cape Town datacentre – Teraco CT1. Latencies can change over time. These changes are usually caused by changes in our IP transit provider networks, or the networks they connect to. If you notice high latency for more than a day or two, it’s best to open a support ticket with us so we can investigate.
We only monitor two IPs per city (v4 and v6). Latency to other IPs in that city can be (very) different to the latency we see in our monitoring. The IPs we choose to monitor have a web based traceroute feature.
⚡️ Atomic’s latency monitoring #
- City Latency Map – Grafana – 5-min updates
- City Latency Dashboard – Uptime Kuma – 15-min updates
- Upstream Packet Loss – Uptime Kuma – 1-min updates
- Upstream Latency Graphs – Grafana – 5-min updates
Also see:
- Latency Alerts Telegram Channel – Notifications for latency changes
- Atomic Looking Glass – Multi-select ipt1, ipt2 and view1 → choose City Latency → Run
- Atomic Network Dashboard – Latency monitoring via 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 optimise 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.