A question I got from a user was – what is the average DNS speed from USA to my country? Many times, your name server might not be in the US but in some other distant country and one might wonder what the average speed is, from the US.

On our DNS report, we display the average DNS speed of your name servers, but sometimes it is helpful to know what users in the US experience averaged across all name servers in that country. So I decided to write this post listing all major countries with the speed it takes from (Utah) the USA to the country. The data consists of several million DNS queries across 500,000 name servers, so it is an accurate representation of users in general.

The speed is calculated as the average DNS speed in milliseconds across all name servers in that particular foreign country. For e.g., if your name servers are in Canada, the average speed with which name servers respond to a query from the US is 77.88 milliseconds. If your name servers are in China, the average latency with which a user in the USA will resolve your domain name is 238.52 milliseconds.

DNS speed depends on various factors like the speed of the network your name server is on, or the proximity of the user to your name server. Proximity and geographical location play a very important role, which is why, the DNS latency between a user in the United States and a name server in Asia is pretty high. European countries do a little better, but still the latency from the USA to Europe is quite high. Comparatively, Japan does a lot better than other Asian countries with a latency of only 128.37 milliseconds.

The table below shows the speed with which a user in the US will be able to query your name server in a specific country:

As this table shows, Iran has the slowest authoritative name servers followed by other Asian countries like Thailand, China, Indonesia and India. Japan has the fastest DNS speed in Asia and it’s latency is even better than European countries which indicates that it has a very fast internet infrastructure.

The 95% confidence interval shows an interval for which we are 95% confident that the average across all name servers (not just ones that we have in our data) will lie in that interval.

If you find that your name server response time is much higher than what the table shows, it might not be proximity that is playing a role, but rather the speed and quality of the network your name servers are on.

If your country is not listed in this table, feel free to leave a comment and I’ll reply with information about your country.

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