An HTTP check from Tirana sends a full GET request including DNS resolution, TCP handshake, optional TLS negotiation, and waits for the first byte of the response. This is the most realistic simulation of what an Albanian user's browser experiences when loading a page. For services using GeoDNS or Anycast, the Albanian source IP will determine which CDN edge or origin is selected — making this check important if you serve users in the region.

Albania is served by CDN edges in Rome, Athens, and sometimes Sofia or Vienna, depending on the provider. Cloudflare, Akamai, and Fastly all have edge presence in nearby cities. If your CDN is correctly configured, HTTP response times from Tirana should stay under 80 ms for cached content. If you see 200+ ms response times, it typically means the CDN is routing Albanian traffic to a distant PoP such as Frankfurt or Amsterdam rather than Rome or Athens.

A non-200 HTTP response from Albania while other European nodes return 200 can indicate geo-blocking, WAF rules keyed on Albanian IP ranges, or a routing anomaly specific to Keminet's address space. AS197706 prefixes are RIPE-registered and should not trigger most commercial WAFs, but some security products flag entire Balkan ASNs. Confirming a 200 from our Albanian node alongside nodes in Italy and Greece helps distinguish WAF blocking from origin-side errors.

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.