DNS Latency by Country: A Comparative Analysis of Geography vs. Anycast Performance

Abstract: Geography vs. Technology

Data Collection Period: Jan 1 – Jan 14, 2026.

In an effort to map the latency topology of the modern web, we aggregated DNS resolution telemetry from 891 hosting providers, stratified by headquarters location. To ensure statistical rigor, we applied a 10% Trimmed Mean (Truncated Mean), eliminating the top and bottom 10% of outliers (e.g., cached 0ms hits or 5s timeouts) to derive a median-resistant average.

Country Rankings (Refined Average)

Methodological Note: 10% Trimmed Mean

Network benchmarking data is inherently noisy due to transient congestion. A single provider with a misconfigured firewall might exhibit a 10-second response, while another might be cached by a local ISP resolving in 1ms. By "trimming" the dataset extremes, we reveal the central tendency of the infrastructure performance.

Example: In a cohort of 50 providers, we systematically discard the top 5 (fastest) and bottom 5 (slowest) results prior to calculating the arithmetic mean to ensure academic validity.

The 'Anycast' Factor in US Results

The US average of 63ms is notably performant for a trans-Atlantic connection (physically ~120ms round trip). This empirical evidence confirms that the majority of US providers utilize Anycast DNS, resolving queries from edge nodes in Europe rather than transmitting requests to the North American continent.

Conclusion

For global latency optimization, the location of the DNS nameserver is more critical than the location of the origin web server. Ideally, utilizing a provider with a robust Anycast DNS network (e.g., Cloudflare or Amazon Route53) ensures <30ms resolution times globally, independent of origin geography.

Compare global DNS speeds in our Hosting Directory.