Ping from our US nodes sends ICMP echo requests and measures round-trip time. Baseline RTTs from the three nodes: Kansas City to New York is around 35 ms, to Los Angeles 40–45 ms. Dallas to New York runs 45–55 ms, to Los Angeles 30–35 ms, to London 130–135 ms. Miami to New York is typically 20–25 ms, to London 115–125 ms, to São Paulo 85–95 ms. These numbers assume clean peering paths — carrier routing decisions and congestion can push individual results 10–20 ms higher during peak hours.

Testing from multiple US nodes simultaneously separates city-specific routing issues from origin-server problems. If Miami shows 200 ms to a target but Dallas and Kansas City are at 50 ms, the path from Miami through that carrier is broken or congested — not the target. Symmetric high latency across all three nodes is a stronger signal that the server itself or its upstream transit is the bottleneck. This three-city view is particularly useful for services targeting US regional audiences.

ICMP rate limiting is common on US cloud infrastructure and CDN edges. Many servers deprioritize ICMP during load, which produces artificial latency spikes or packet loss that does not reflect real TCP application performance. Always cross-check ping results with a TCP check on the actual application port. A host showing 10% loss in ICMP but zero loss in TCP is applying ICMP shaping — not experiencing real connectivity issues.

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.