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I also believed that, but at least for India, this doesn't work in practice. Unless you atleast do the 25$ pro plan, cloudflare routes even india-to-india, hell

by ghoul2 8d ago

I also believed that, but at least for India, this doesn't work in practice. Unless you atleast do the 25$ pro plan, cloudflare routes even india-to-india, hell, even mumbai-to-mumbai and aws_mumbai-to-cloudflare_mumbai traffic via Marsaille!! Not even Singapore. The unstated reason is that indian transit is expensive, though I fail to believe its cheaper to go from mumbai to marsaille and back to mumbai. I am guessing the real reason (and at this point I am discounting incompetence - this has been true for years, so they are aware). You switch to the pro plan for the zone and everything now routes within india, 100s of milliseconds of latency saved. Its even worse for workers and workers AI and embedding search. I found multiple seconds of latency, all vanishing the moment the zone is on pro plan (It seems R2, workers, workers AI - none of them are deployed in an India POP - unconfirmed, of course, cause there is no way to actually communicate with cloudflare). Now 25$/month isn't much - though it does change calculations compared to "FREE!!" - but I would have liked to know this going in, instead of discovering this after having made the commitment. Seems like a deliberate dark pattern, to force people into the pro plan. Shame, really - I love the CF stack(workers and DO are just so fantastic to build on), but these shenanigans, plus the utter refusal to provide ANY level of support, keep souring me on them.

piperswe 8d ago
Transit in some countries, like India, genuinely is that expensive. Keep in mind it doesn’t cost Cloudflare any more to serve Indian traffic from Marsaille than to serve non-peered French traffic from that colo - they aren’t paying the cost of getting traffic between India and France.
- ghoul2 8d ago
  The traffic still has to flow from an india provider to the international leg and back via the domestic provider. In anycase, then they should document it clearly that they have unacceptable insertion latency in india and the free plan is entirely unusable for india. Instead of advertising '10 pops in india!!'
  - nightpool 8d ago
    > The traffic still has to flow from an india provider to the international leg and back via the domestic provider. Right, but Cloudflare doesn't have to pay for it in that case. If Cloudflare sends you to their Indian POP, then they have to pay their Indian service provider for traffic. If they send you to their France POP, then they have to pay their French ISP for traffic. The Indian provider cannot claim any of Cloudflare's traffic in that case, because the Indian service provider wouldn't have any relationship with Cloudflare This is very standard for places with high ISP costs, like South Korea and India. You can see a lot of discussion about it online. I agree with you that Cloudflare should be more transparent if / when they make different routing decision for Free/Pro plans based on bandwidth costs, but I don't think their decision itself is unreasonable at all. Indian bandwidth is very expensive.
    - mitxela 8d ago
      You would think Cloudflare would be in a position to do something about it, like they did with several cloud services in their Bandwidth Alliance. It would be a win-win-win for networks to interconnect better in India, it just can't happen stepwise because any individual step is a lose for somebody.
toast0 8d ago
> The unstated reason is that indian transit is expensive, though I fail to believe its cheaper to go from mumbai to marsaille and back to mumbai. IMHO, it's not that hard to believe. a) Every hosting provider I've looked at prices for charges significantly more for bandwidth from their Indian locations. b) In the US, transit providers basically never charged different rates for different destinations [1]. In Europe, it's typically rare, sometimes transit to the local incumbent telecom is more, sometimes there's a different rate for Europe or non-Europe, but there won't be a specific destination charge for India, it will be part of a blended rate. Otoh, east Asia often has separate rates for specific nearby countries and India is likely to be one of those... Transit prices in Europe are pretty low compared to prices in India, so the blended price being less than the India direct price is not surprising to me at all. [1] gcp premium does charge by destination, but the premium transit price is pretty close to their price for cross location traffic to something near the destination + non-premium traffic from that location... Which is more or less what their premium network egress is.
- mitxela 8d ago
  It's basically that payment flows towards the core of the network, which is Europe and America. If you're the first Indian ISP, you have to pay a European ISP for an upstream connection - they won't pay you. And that persists and becomes "just the way things are done". It can only reverse if there are significant websites in India that Europeans want to access, then the European ISPs will be getting more value than the Indian ones and the Indian ones will be able to demand payment.
mitxela 8d ago
> The unstated reason is that indian transit is expensive, though I fail to believe its cheaper to go from mumbai to marsaille and back to mumbai. Your Indian ISP is paying a French ISP for both directions of that traffic, which makes it cheap at the French end. Were it India-to-India, Cloudflare would have to pay your ISP.

by ghoul2 8d ago

piperswe 8d ago

Transit in some countries, like India, genuinely is that expensive. Keep in mind it doesn’t cost Cloudflare any more to serve Indian traffic from Marsaille than to serve non-peered French traffic from that colo - they aren’t paying the cost of getting traffic between India and France.

ghoul2 8d ago
The traffic still has to flow from an india provider to the international leg and back via the domestic provider. In anycase, then they should document it clearly that they have unacceptable insertion latency in india and the free plan is entirely unusable for india. Instead of advertising '10 pops in india!!'
- nightpool 8d ago
  > The traffic still has to flow from an india provider to the international leg and back via the domestic provider. Right, but Cloudflare doesn't have to pay for it in that case. If Cloudflare sends you to their Indian POP, then they have to pay their Indian service provider for traffic. If they send you to their France POP, then they have to pay their French ISP for traffic. The Indian provider cannot claim any of Cloudflare's traffic in that case, because the Indian service provider wouldn't have any relationship with Cloudflare This is very standard for places with high ISP costs, like South Korea and India. You can see a lot of discussion about it online. I agree with you that Cloudflare should be more transparent if / when they make different routing decision for Free/Pro plans based on bandwidth costs, but I don't think their decision itself is unreasonable at all. Indian bandwidth is very expensive.
  - mitxela 8d ago
    You would think Cloudflare would be in a position to do something about it, like they did with several cloud services in their Bandwidth Alliance. It would be a win-win-win for networks to interconnect better in India, it just can't happen stepwise because any individual step is a lose for somebody.

toast0 8d ago

> The unstated reason is that indian transit is expensive, though I fail to believe its cheaper to go from mumbai to marsaille and back to mumbai. IMHO, it's not that hard to believe. a) Every hosting provider I've looked at prices for charges significantly more for bandwidth from their Indian locations. b) In the US, transit providers basically never charged different rates for different destinations [1]. In Europe, it's typically rare, sometimes transit to the local incumbent telecom is more, sometimes there's a different rate for Europe or non-Europe, but there won't be a specific destination charge for India, it will be part of a blended rate. Otoh, east Asia often has separate rates for specific nearby countries and India is likely to be one of those... Transit prices in Europe are pretty low compared to prices in India, so the blended price being less than the India direct price is not surprising to me at all. [1] gcp premium does charge by destination, but the premium transit price is pretty close to their price for cross location traffic to something near the destination + non-premium traffic from that location... Which is more or less what their premium network egress is.

mitxela 8d ago
It's basically that payment flows towards the core of the network, which is Europe and America. If you're the first Indian ISP, you have to pay a European ISP for an upstream connection - they won't pay you. And that persists and becomes "just the way things are done". It can only reverse if there are significant websites in India that Europeans want to access, then the European ISPs will be getting more value than the Indian ones and the Indian ones will be able to demand payment.

mitxela 8d ago

> The unstated reason is that indian transit is expensive, though I fail to believe its cheaper to go from mumbai to marsaille and back to mumbai. Your Indian ISP is paying a French ISP for both directions of that traffic, which makes it cheap at the French end. Were it India-to-India, Cloudflare would have to pay your ISP.