We have collected 20 servers in France in total, and 6 of them answered a real OpenVPN handshake within the last five minutes — all of them over TCP. The quickest replied in 75 ms, against a country average of 641 ms. Over the past seven days the ones still standing have answered 48.3% of the probes we sent them.

Everything answering here speaks TCP. That is the slower option in principle, and the more reliable one in practice — it survives mobile networks and restrictive firewalls that quietly discard UDP. The ports most of them listen on here are 443, 1214, 1883 — 443 is the one least likely to be blocked on a restrictive network, so start there if you are behind a corporate or campus firewall. Once you have picked one, the iPhone, Android and desktop guides each take about two minutes.

Nothing new has appeared in France in the last twenty-four hours — the fleet here is the same one as yesterday. Volunteer machines do come and go without notice, which is why the list is rebuilt every hour rather than curated once. How the score is built has the formula in full.

Two things these figures deliberately do not claim. The latency is measured from our prober, which sits in one fixed place — it ranks France servers against each other honestly, but it is not a prediction of your own ping. If you are closer to France than our prober is, yours will be lower than the number shown. And a handshake proves an OpenVPN daemon is listening; it says nothing about whether that machine's own connection is healthy, and nothing at all about who runs it or what they can see.