We have collected 26 servers in Germany in total, and 5 of them answered a real OpenVPN handshake within the last five minutes — 1 over UDP and 4 over TCP. The quickest replied in 247 ms, against a country average of 558 ms. Over the past seven days the ones still standing have answered 98.5% of the probes we sent them.

Between the two protocols: UDP is faster and is the right default on a fixed connection, while the 4 TCP entries are the safer pick on mobile data or behind a firewall, because carriers and corporate networks drop idle UDP long before they interfere with TCP. The ports most of them listen on here are 443, 110, 60763 — 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 Germany 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 Germany servers against each other honestly, but it is not a prediction of your own ping. If you are closer to Germany 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.