Ping from our Tirana node (AS197706, Keminet) sends ICMP echo requests and records round-trip time. Baseline RTTs from Tirana on well-peered paths: Rome ~28–32 ms, Vienna ~33–37 ms, Frankfurt ~42–48 ms, Amsterdam ~50–58 ms, London ~60–68 ms, New York ~140–160 ms. These figures assume the target network has decent peering back into the Balkan region. Targets with no Balkan presence or limited RIPE NCC peering tend to add 10–20 ms on top of these baselines due to sub-optimal transit routing.

Running a ping from Albania is particularly useful when diagnosing connectivity for services targeting Albanian or broader Western Balkan audiences. A server hosted in Frankfurt typically sees ~45 ms RTT from Tirana — acceptable for most web applications but relevant for latency-sensitive workloads like real-time APIs or gaming. A server hosted in Vienna or Rome will land in the 28–35 ms range, which is the practical minimum for a non-Albanian-hosted origin.

ICMP is deprioritized or rate-limited on many transit routers. If ping shows elevated RTT but TCP checks to the same host are within expected range, the issue is ICMP handling rather than real path congestion. Albanian ISPs do not typically block ICMP outbound, so a clean ping result from our Tirana node is a reliable signal that the path is usable.

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.