2026-09-25 · IPV4 Scanner
Ping is the number people quote when they're losing an argument about their internet. It measures one specific thing, and it's not the thing most connections are sold on. Understanding what it is, and what it isn't, saves you from paying for bandwidth you don't need to fix a problem bandwidth won't touch.
Ping is the round trip time for a small packet to reach a server and come back, in milliseconds. That's it. It doesn't measure how much data you can move, only how long the trip takes. A connection can have a huge download speed and a terrible ping, or the reverse, because the two are separate properties of the line.
Distance sets the floor, and physics enforces it. Light in fibre covers roughly 200 km per millisecond, and real routes are never straight, so London to Sydney can't be fast no matter what anyone's paying. What you're actually looking for isn't a small number so much as a steady one.
Rough numbers, because the honest answer is "it depends on distance":
A steady 200 ms beats a 40 ms that keeps spiking to 400. Consistency matters as much as the raw figure, sometimes more.
In a fast game, ping is the delay between you pressing a button and the server registering it. At 20 ms you and the server are basically in sync. At 150 ms you're acting on a picture of the game that's already old, which is why you "shot first" and still died. No amount of extra bandwidth helps here. A 50 Mbps line at 20 ms is a better gaming connection than a 1 Gbps line at 150 ms, full stop.
Two things wreck gaming latency beyond raw distance. Jitter, which is the ping bouncing around instead of holding steady, and bufferbloat, which is what happens when something else on your connection starts a big download and your latency jumps from 20 ms to several hundred. If your games are fine until someone in the house starts a download, that's bufferbloat, and no speed upgrade fixes it.
Calls care about latency and jitter more than bandwidth. A steady 80 ms is fine. A ping bouncing between 20 and 200 is what makes everyone talk over each other, because the delay keeps changing and nobody can find the rhythm of the conversation. If calls break up while your speed test looks great, latency is where to look, not download speed.
A server can answer a ping in 20 ms and still take four seconds to build a web page. Ping measures the network trip and nothing else, not the database query or the template render or the twelve scripts the page loads afterward. Use ping to answer "is the network between here and there healthy." How fast a site feels is a completely different measurement.
If you want to see your latency from more than one place at once, our global ping test pings a host from probes on six continents. A number that's low from one region and awful from another tells you the server has no presence near the slow region, which is exactly the gap a CDN exists to close.
What's a good ping for gaming?
Under 60 ms to the game server is comfortable, under 30 is excellent. Above 100 you'll feel it in fast games. Steadiness counts too. A jumpy 40 is worse than a rock-steady 70.
Does a high ping mean my internet is slow?
Not in the way you'd think. Ping and bandwidth are different. A satellite link can have loads of bandwidth and dreadful latency. An old DSL line can have low latency and very little bandwidth. For download and upload figures, run a speed test instead.
Why is my ping fine most of the time but terrible sometimes?
Usually bufferbloat. When something saturates your connection, oversized buffers queue everything and latency spikes. Test your ping while a big download runs and compare it to idle. A large gap is the tell, and the fix is router-side queue management, not a faster plan.
Can I lower my ping?
To a point. A wired connection instead of Wi-Fi, closing bandwidth hogs, and fixing bufferbloat all help. What you can't beat is distance. If the server's on another continent, the round trip has a floor that no upgrade gets under.
Why is my ping different to different servers?
Because each server is a different distance away and reached by a different route. That's normal, and it's exactly why measuring from several locations at once tells you more than a single number ever could.