[kevincox]

You'd be surprised at the poor path that the average packet takes. Cloudflare has lots of PoPs that are very close to major cities so it is very conceivable that if that brings you to a higher quality backbone it would result in better performance overall. I don't know about the quality of Cloudflare's backbone but at Google you could definitely get noticeably better performance by quickly getting into the Google backbone and popping back onto the internet near your destination.

[crazytalk]

Do they even maintain something resembling a backbone? A lot of these CDNs just use public transit for outwards traffic

[jshier]

Yes, they maintain prioritized links between their datacenters, many of which are fully private. However, the Warp free plan simply bounces to the nearest CF datacenter which participates in Warp (not all of their centers do) and then back into the public internet, though it's through their massive pipe. Warp+ uses their Argo routing through their private backbone to get you as close to the origin as possible within the Warp network.