How Deutsche Telekom Makes Cloudflare Re-Route Traffic Around the Globe

February 24, 2025 - 4 min read

Over the last few years, I’ve made it a habit to use dev tools on most websites I visit. In doing so, I’ve noticed that very often, when using a connection from Deutsche Telekom, requests to domains on Cloudflare show EWR as PoP in the response headers. CDNs like Cloudflare use many data centers (points of presence) around the world to serve content to users. These PoPs are usually named after nearby airports. Therefore, EWR indicates that the request was served from the airport in Newark, New Jersey.

Now, this wouldn’t be a problem if it weren’t for the fact that the request was made from Europe/Germany, where there are 59 PoPs nearby. In other words, despite there being plenty of capacity available in Europe, the request is being routed through a PoP in the US, thereby adding plenty of latency and wasting energy. Especially, if the origin server is also located in Europe. This, obviously, is against the entire purpose of using a CDN. While using other ISPs, requests are correctly routed to a nearby PoP. Since Cloudflare is one of the largest CDN providers, a sizable chunk of websites is affected by this.

I first noticed this pattern in early 2024 but disregarded it at first as just a temporary issue. But when it didn’t go away even many months later, I became a bit suspicious. Doing some research, I found that some others had noticed the same issue, although it still seemed to be a topic of controversy. So I decided to investigate this issue myself.

First off, the issue only seems to affect sites on Cloudflare’s free tier. The plan that a site is on can be seen by looking at its DNS records using a tool like Domain Digger. I’ve found the following rules to be generally true: A free site has two IP addresses, one starting with 104. and one starting with 172.. A Pro plan site has three IP addresses, two starting with 104., and one starting with 172.. Business plan sites have two IP addresses, both starting with 104..

At this point, I was only certain that my own requests were being routed through the US for all free sites. But what about other users? To verify this, I needed to ask as many people as possible which PoP they were being connected to. Fortunately, I was able to automate this by looking at the headers Cloudflare sends to the origin server with every request. For that, I’ve written a little app serving a 1x1 pixel image, which I would then embed on my websites. Like this, I was able to gather a list of preferred PoPs for 6,527 distinct IP addresses, 499 of which are from Germany.

So here are the results: With only a single exception, all requests through Deutsche Telekom AG or T-Mobile Deutschland GmbH are routed to North America. Looking at other German ISPs, requests are always routed to a PoP in Germany or a neighboring country.

But why? Why are requests from Deutsche Telekom routed to North America? According to users on Reddit, this is due to Deutsche Telekom, which is the largest ISP in Germany, abusing its market position to charge high fees to Cloudflare. Since Cloudflare is not willing to pay that premium for their free customers, it appears the cheaper option is to simply route all requests through North America.

The unfortunate reality is that most likely, nothing will change about this. Deutsche Telekom is in such a powerful position, being trusted by large parts of the German population, that there is no incentive to provide a better service.

For those interested, the full dataset is available for review.