Latency is the delay for data to travel from your device to a server and back, measured in milliseconds; it is why a page can feel slow on a fast connection.
Explanation
Latency, often shown as ping or round-trip time, is set first by physics. Light in optical fibre travels at roughly 200,000 km per second, so every 1,000 km of cable adds about 10 ms to a round trip before any router or server does any work. Real cables do not run in straight lines, and every network hop and queue adds more. Latency is not bandwidth. A plan's Mbps figure says how much data can flow per second. Latency says how long each exchange takes, and loading a page is many exchanges: DNS lookup, TCP connection, TLS handshake, the HTML, then the scripts and images it asks for. So a distant server feels sluggish on any line. A web proxy puts one more stop on the path: your device to the proxy, then the proxy to the site. The second leg usually runs over fast data-centre links. The first leg is the one you control by choosing the nearest AnyProxy region: Singapore, Frankfurt or Virginia on the free tier, plus Tokyo and Los Angeles on Pro. Latency can also be a sign of interference. OONI proved throttling in Turkiye in 2025 because handshakes to targeted platforms took much longer than to neighbouring hosts.
In practice
OONI's 2025 report on Turkiye used delay itself as evidence. It compared how long the TLS handshake took for twitter.com with 19 other hostnames on the same IP prefixes. Only the targeted platforms were slow, and that extra delay showed deliberate throttling rather than a busy network. A single slow site next to fast ones on the same connection is the pattern to look for.
Sources: OONI — Throttling of social media in Turkiye (20 Nov 2025)
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