Deutsche Telekom will sell Cloudflare to European businesses, under a sovereignty banner
Europe's largest telecoms operator is adding a US edge platform to its enterprise portfolio and wiring its network straight into it. Both companies describe the deal as serving digital sovereignty.
Deutsche Telekom and Cloudflare announced a strategic partnership on 29 September. Telekom’s enterprise arm, T-Systems, will add Cloudflare’s security and connectivity products to its portfolio and train its own staff to sell and run them. The two companies also interconnected their networks directly, and the routing change was substantially complete by 1 October.
The peering half of the deal fixes a long-standing complaint. Traffic between Telekom and Cloudflare used to take a detour through Arelion or Cogent, whose capacity often could not keep up, and Telekom faced accusations that it was throttling the route on purpose. heise checked the public looking glass before and after: on 29 September packets still travelled via carriers such as Lumen and Tata, and by the morning of 1 October the intermediaries had dropped out of the AS path.
Both companies put a sovereignty label on it. The joint release says the two intend to work on “the evolving security and digital sovereignty requirements of European enterprises”, including post-quantum cryptography for critical data and infrastructure. Cloudflare is a San Francisco company listed on the NYSE. What Europe’s largest telecoms operator is adding to its enterprise catalogue, and putting its sales organisation behind, is an American platform.
Cloudflare already delivers the content of more than a quarter of all websites worldwide, by heise’s count. European options in the same space exist and are in this catalogue: Bunny.net in Slovenia and KeyCDN in Switzerland both cover caching, DNS, storage and DDoS protection at predictable per-gigabyte pricing. Neither runs an edge compute platform comparable to Cloudflare Workers, which is the gap that keeps the fit short of a full replacement.
One detail from heise’s routing test makes the shape of the problem concrete. The IP range they traced, 172.64.145.0/24, serves Cloudflare customers including Jimdo — the Hamburg website builder that this site lists as a European alternative to Wix. A German product sold on European hosting reaches German readers over an American content delivery network, and from 1 October it does so over a shorter path.