UDP checks from the US nodes send a probe packet to the target port and report whether a response was received within the timeout window. UDP is connectionless, so a response confirms the port is reachable and something is listening — it does not establish a full session. Typical targets for US UDP checks include DNS resolvers, game servers on custom ports, NTP servers, VoIP endpoints (SIP on 5060), and VPN gateways (WireGuard on 51820, OpenVPN on 1194).

US hosting networks at Dallas and Miami have good UDP paths to Latin America and the Caribbean, making them useful for testing game servers or streaming endpoints that primarily serve North and South American users. Kansas City sits centrally with low-latency UDP paths to both coasts. No response to a UDP probe does not necessarily mean the service is down — many application protocols (WireGuard, for example) deliberately discard probes that do not contain valid session data.

For operators running US-based UDP services, checking from all three US nodes simultaneously can surface geographic reachability gaps within the country. A VPN endpoint responding from Dallas and Kansas City but not Miami may indicate an asymmetric BGP route from the Miami upstream that drops UDP on the return path, or a firewall rule applied specifically to the Miami-region source IP space. Compare against our Canadian node to determine whether the issue is US-wide or limited to specific US carriers.

The US internet backbone is anchored in Ashburn, Virginia, where Equinix operates the largest concentration of interconnected networks in the country. Over 500 networks peer at the Equinix campus in Ashburn, including AT&T (AS7018), Comcast (AS7922), Lumen/CenturyLink (AS3356), Cogent (AS174), and NTT (AS2914). The density of peering there means that a packet originating in Miami or Dallas often transits through Ashburn before exiting to Europe, making it the effective default gateway for US-to-Europe traffic regardless of where the origin server sits.

Our US nodes span three cities across the South, Central, and Midwest regions. Miami runs on AS202673 (Ohz Digital SL) and is the southernmost probe — useful for measuring connectivity relevant to Latin American networks and Caribbean-facing services. Dallas runs on AS201129 (Linceris International Cloud) at Dallas DC, positioned at the intersection of south-central US routes with good proximity to both Equinix Dallas peering and central US backbone routes. Kansas City runs on AS22295 (Advin Services LLC / Tierhive) in the Midwest, providing a third vantage point with direct access to central US carrier paths.

Reference RTTs from these nodes under normal load: Miami to London is approximately 120 ms, Miami to São Paulo around 85 ms. Dallas to Frankfurt typically runs 130–135 ms via transatlantic submarine cables landing on the US East Coast. Kansas City to New York is roughly 35 ms, and Kansas City to Los Angeles is in the 40–45 ms range. These figures vary by carrier — Cogent and Lumen have different peering strategies at Ashburn, which produces measurably different latency for the same destination depending on which AS the probe exits through.

Key US transit providers reachable from all three nodes include AT&T (AS7018), Comcast Business (AS7922), Lumen (AS3356), Cogent (AS174), and NTT America (AS2914). These five carriers collectively carry the majority of US internet traffic and each maintains presence in Dallas, Kansas City, and Miami in addition to Ashburn. At the IX level, DE-CIX New York and NYIIX serve the Northeast corridor. Equinix Dallas and CoreSite serve south-central US. Miami is served by the NAP of the Americas facility, a major Latin America-facing interconnect point operated by Equinix.

Running checks across all three US nodes simultaneously provides geographic diversity within a single country that matters. A server hosted on AWS us-east-1 will show different RTTs from Miami (via southeast paths), Dallas (via south-central), and Kansas City (via central US backbone). A CDN with US PoPs should show low single-digit or sub-10ms results from all three. If one node shows significantly higher latency than the others, the routing from that city or the serving carrier is suboptimal for that node's upstream transit mix.