Cloudflare warp update#

We ran an analysis on a subset of our network traffic to find a rough approximation of how many users we have per city.Websites and third party services often infer geolocation from your IP address, and now, 1.1.1.1 + WARP replaces your original IP address with one that consistently and accurately represents your approximate location.

However, because not every Internet Service Provider (ISP) peers with Cloudflare, users sometimes end up exiting the Cloudflare network from a more “random” data center – one that does not accurately represent their locale. We took a different approach when we first launched WARP in 2018, giving you the best possible performance by routing your traffic through the Cloudflare data center closest to you. Traditionally, consumer VPNs deliberately route your traffic through a server in another country, making your connection slow, and often getting blocked because of their ability to flout location-based content restrictions. Instead, websites you visit will see a Cloudflare IP address instead, making it harder for them to track you directly.

Cloudflare warp update#

We just rolled out a major update to the service that powers WARP that will give you a geographically accurate browsing experience without revealing your IP address to the websites you’re visiting. This can also be disruptive if you’re trying to stream content subject to licensing restrictions, such as a person in the UK trying to watch BBC iPlayer or a person in Brazil trying to watch the World Cup.

For example, in somewhere dense with country borders, like Europe, your traffic in Berlin could get routed to Amsterdam because your mobile operator chooses to not peer in-country, giving you results in Dutch instead of German. Regardless of the cause, the impact is that your search results become less relevant, if not outright confusing. Other times, Internet Service Providers may not peer with Cloudflare or engage in traffic engineering to optimize their networks how they see fit, which could result in user traffic connecting to a location that doesn’t quite map to their locale or language. Why? Sometimes, because traffic congestion or technical issues route your traffic to a less congested part of the network. What we discovered over time is that the topology of the Internet dictates a different type of experience for users in different locations.

When we originally built the 1.1.1.1+ WARP mobile app, we wanted to create a consumer-friendly way to connect to our network and privacy-respecting DNS resolver. A better Internet browsing experience for every WARP user With that in mind, we’re excited to announce two major improvements to our 1.1.1.1 + WARP apps: first, an improvement to how we ensure search results and other geographically-aware Internet activity work without compromising your privacy, and second, a larger network with more locations available to WARP+ subscribers, powering even speedier connections to our global network. Too inaccurate and you’re getting pizza places from a neighboring country too accurate and you’re reducing the privacy benefits of obscuring your location. When you use a Cloudflare product that sits between you and the Internet (for example, WARP), it’s one of the ways we work to balance user experience and privacy. At Cloudflare, we affectionately call this type of geolocation accuracy the “pizza test”. If the search goes as intended, your browser will show you results that are within a few miles, often based on the assumed location of your IP address. You open your browser, looking for nearby pizza spots that are open.