TCP checks from Tirana (AS197706) attempt a SYN-ACK handshake to your host on a specified port and measure the connection time. This verifies that a port is reachable from Albanian network infrastructure specifically — useful for services targeting the Albanian market or for diagnosing reports of unreachable ports from Balkan users. TCP checks bypass ICMP filtering and reflect real firewall and routing behaviour.

Keminet (AS197706) does not apply outbound port filtering on commercial connections, so a failed TCP check from our Albanian node indicates the block is on the target side or in transit. Common causes: firewall rules blocking non-EU or Balkan ASNs, geo-IP restrictions, or cloud security groups that whitelist only specific regions. Comparing against our Italian and Greek nodes will confirm whether the block is Albania-specific or affects the broader Southern European IP range.

TCP connection times from Albania to Frankfurt-region targets typically land around 42–50 ms for the handshake RTT. To Rome-region targets, expect 28–34 ms. For services requiring sub-20 ms TCP handshake times, Albania-origin traffic will need to terminate at a local or regional proxy — there is no path from Tirana to Central Europe under that threshold given the physical geography.

Albania's internet infrastructure is concentrated in Tirana, where the majority of the country's carrier infrastructure, colocation, and peering is located. AITEX (Albanian Internet Exchange) is the primary national IX, providing a domestic peering point that reduces the need for Albanian ISPs to hair-pin traffic through Vienna or Frankfurt. Keminet SHPK (AS197706) is one of the largest domestic providers and operates significant infrastructure within Tirana, including the node used for our checks.

International transit from Albania primarily exits via submarine cable and terrestrial links toward Italy and Greece. The Tirana-to-Rome path runs approximately 25–30 ms over well-routed paths, and Tirana-to-Vienna sits around 30–35 ms. These figures put Albania within usable reach of Central and Western European CDN infrastructure, though latency is noticeably higher than from hub countries like Germany or the Netherlands. Providers with direct links to Telecom Italia or A1 Telekom Austria tend to show the best RTTs.

The Albanian backbone is served by a small number of major carriers. Albtelecom (AS8774) operates the legacy fixed-line infrastructure and holds significant transit market share. IPKO (AS34772) and Digitalb serve the mobile and broadband segments. Keminet (AS197706) competes as a commercial ISP and hosting provider. BGP routing tables for Albanian prefixes are relatively compact, with most originated prefixes falling under a handful of upstream transit providers including GTT (AS3257), Cogent (AS174), and Telia (AS1299).

Albania is an EU candidate country, which has driven investment in infrastructure and regulatory alignment with EU frameworks. Data center market growth has accelerated since 2020, with Tirana seeing new colocation facilities aimed at both domestic demand and regional hosting for Balkan-focused services. Keminet's own data center in Tirana is the primary facility backing our probe node. Connectivity between Tirana and other Balkan capitals — Skopje, Pristina, Podgorica — is generally better than older terrestrial maps would suggest, with direct Balkan transit links maturing over the past five years.

Our probe node runs in Tirana on AS197706 (Keminet SHPK). Results from this node reflect traffic conditions on one of Albania's largest commercial ISPs. For targets primarily accessed by Albanian residential users, results may differ slightly depending on whether the target is reachable via Albtelecom's residential network or through Keminet's commercial routing. Cross-referencing with nodes in Italy (Rome) and Greece gives a useful baseline for verifying whether high latency is Albania-side or origin-side.