Helping underserved communities expand access to the Internet for free
While the Internet is central to our lives, half of the world’s population has no access to it, with many more limited to poor, expensive, and unreliable connectivity. Despite large levels of public investment and private infrastructure, this uneven and unfair access persists.
In response, networks owned by and operated within affected communities have emerged to solve the access problem — and they consistently demonstrate success. With minimal training and support, communities are building their own local networks cheaply and reliably with commodity hardware and non-specialist equipment.
Project Pangea is Cloudflare’s effort to help bring underserved communities secure connectivity to the Internet through our global and interconnected network. We are partnering with communities to help connect their locally built networks to the Internet for free.
The challenges
Communities around the world are increasingly investing in physical infrastructure to promote Internet connectivity, including WiFi antennas and fiber cables. However, even after communities establish local connections, the connection to the global Internet can be prohibitively expensive — if it can be found at all.
Our mission is to help build a better Internet for everyone. Project Pangea extends the Internet we are helping to build — a faster, more reliable, more secure Internet — to people who might not otherwise be able to access it.
With Project Pangea, we can help communities solve the network challenges of routing traffic to and from the Internet on behalf of the local or community network, while also providing essential security, privacy, and performance resources.
Cloudflare launched Cloudflare Network Interconnect in August 2020 to allow our customers to connect directly to our network for improved performance and reliability. Magic Transit and Magic Firewall provide those same customers with protection from malicious traffic like DDoS attacks. While we have used these services to help large enterprises improve the reliability and security of their networks, these same tools, with the same security and privacy protections built in, can be used by underserved populations who would not otherwise have reliable access.
Industry support
Pangea participants
Apply to Project Pangea
Eligibility requirements
Project Pangea is intended to help extend more secure and reliable Internet access to underserved communities. To be eligible, participants must be nonprofit entities, cooperative community networks, or private or small commercial networks operating in the interest of the community, and must be primarily focused on providing Internet access to local, underserved communities.
Bandwidth cannot exceed 5 Gbps at the 95th percentile (Cloudflare may update this figure upon 15 days’ notice).
Resale of Cloudflare's Internet provisions and security services provided under Project Pangea are for the benefit of the community network only and not available for resale to other networks, individuals, or entities.
Project Pangea may not be available in all jurisdictions.
Technical requirements
At this stage, the program includes one technical requirement:
The network has or can establish backhaul to an exchange point at eligible Cloudflare public or private peering locations found here.
As the project evolves, we may modify these technical requirements.