Three Performance Tiers Across Five Continents
Our global benchmarking reveals a clear tiering pattern that correlates with internet infrastructure maturity and peering density rather than simple geographic proximity.
The first tier -- Singapore (35ms), Netherlands (37ms), United States (38ms), South Korea (39ms), and Germany (41ms) -- delivers sub-45ms latency and 90+ Mbps throughput. These locations share a common characteristic: each sits at the center of a major internet exchange ecosystem (SGIX, AMS-IX, Equinix Ashburn, KINX, DE-CIX) where peering density creates exceptionally short paths to diverse destinations. For workloads without strict geographic requirements, these five locations offer the best raw performance.
The second tier -- Canada (42ms), UK (44ms), France (45ms), Italy (48ms), Japan (52ms), UAE (55ms), and Australia (58ms) -- delivers 42-58ms latency and 78-91 Mbps throughput. Each location provides premium performance for its regional market and competitive latency to neighboring countries.
The third tier -- Brazil (61ms), India (65ms), and South Africa (72ms) -- represents emerging internet markets where our infrastructure investment delivers 40-60% better performance than industry averages, despite higher absolute latency numbers.
Throughput Rankings Tell a Different Story
Latency tiers do not map directly to throughput rankings. South Korea leads at 110 Mbps despite ranking fourth in latency, driven by the country's universal gigabit broadband infrastructure. Singapore follows at 105 Mbps, then Netherlands at 98 Mbps. The US achieves 97 Mbps from our owned hardware in Ashburn VA running through Frontier, Windstream, COX, AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, Charter, and RCN. Throughput reflects local broadband quality more than peering architecture, which is why Korea and Singapore -- both fiber-saturated markets -- outperform larger countries with mixed broadband profiles.
Success Rate Variance: From 97.8% to 99.5%
Connection success rates range from South Africa's 97.8% to Singapore's 99.5%. This spread reflects infrastructure stability differences rather than proxy quality differences -- our proxy management layer operates identically in every region. Markets with load shedding (South Africa), intermittent connectivity (India), or aggressive platform-level blocking (Japan) show slightly lower success rates. Markets with stable power, fiber-dominant infrastructure, and clean IP reputations (Singapore, Netherlands, US) achieve the highest reliability.
Regional Hub Strategy for Multi-Market Operations
Teams operating across multiple regions can optimize cost and complexity by anchoring to four hub locations. The United States (Ashburn VA) covers North and Central America with ISP proxies on owned hardware. The Netherlands covers Western Europe via AMS-IX pan-European routing. Singapore covers all of Southeast Asia through its submarine cable nexus. The UAE bridges the Middle East, South Asia, and East Africa from its three-continent cable position. Adding spoke allocations in specific countries (Japan, Brazil, South Africa) when localized IP addresses are strictly required completes coverage without proliferating regional proxy subscriptions.
How We Benchmark: Methodology and Transparency
Every regional test follows a standardized protocol: 4,500-10,000 HTTP/HTTPS requests over 24-hour windows, targeting diverse domain categories (e-commerce, media, finance, government) to avoid skewing results toward easy or hard targets. We test both residential proxies through our proprietary network of 10M+ IPs across 150+ countries and ISP proxies from our Ashburn VA infrastructure. Results are updated monthly, and historical data is available so teams can track performance trends over time.
The 47% Latency Advantage, Quantified
Across all 15 regions, Hex Proxies delivers an average of 47% lower latency compared to industry benchmarks. This gap is widest in emerging markets: 53% lower in Brazil, 54% lower in India, and 54% lower in South Africa. In premium markets, the gap narrows but remains significant: 47% lower in the US, 46% lower in the UK, and 47% lower in Germany. These are not cherry-picked results from ideal conditions -- they represent 24-hour aggregates across diverse targets and connection types.