During a second series of tests, with reference 4G speeds of 35.8Mbits down and 10.6Mbit/s up, Warp averaged 28.4 down and 5.38Mbit/s up. With Warp+ Unlimited, Cloudflare's faster, paid-for service, download speeds weren't significantly improved, coming in at between 18Mbit/s and 30Mbit/s, but we got upload speeds of up to 10Mbit/s. Connected to ADSL via Wi-Fi, Warp+ Unlimited chugged along at around our usual 5Mbit/s, with occasional drops in speed.
Dedicated speed tests obviously aren't the be-all and end-all of online performance. We perceived a slight speed improvement in our general use of social media or web browsing while connected to Warp, which more realistically represents what people actually do with their phones.
When we ran a series of traceroute commands from an Android terminal emulator, Cloudflare's advantage here became apparent. The route from our 4G provider to our European reference site usually takes around 14 hops – points at which the data packet moved from one router to another – and about 2.1 seconds to get there.
With Warp or Warp+ connected, the same site was typically reached in eight hops and around 0.4 of a second. Connecting a US site took 8 hops and one second via Warp, compared to 14 hops and slightly more than a second to get there without it – the improvements are marginal, certainly, but could add up to a smoother and more responsive browsing experience
The advantage appears to primarily come from Cloudflare's dedicated backend infrastructure. Rather than sending your traffic across sometimes meandering routes via the public internet, Cloudflare sends data directly through its own servers and dedicated connections where possible.
1.1.1.1's terms and conditions also state that "Warp and Warp+ will not route traffic data from your device through the Cloudflare network for certain Internet properties, such as over-the-top content provider websites, as determined by Cloudflare in its sole discretion." That is likely to include streaming services such as Netflix and Hulu.
To confirm this, we watched Netflix while connected to Warp, and we were only presented with our local film selection. An email from Netflix confirmed that it had detected a new connection from our local geographic region, even though a manual IP address check indicated that we were using a US endpoint.
