View Full Version : Understanding ping
Wigglyamps
20th Dec 2015, 08:39
Could someone explain to me in language an idiot could understand (me) what ping actually is, since the beginning of December my ping has gone from about 40ms to 180ms which makes online gaming impossible, although my download speed hasn't changed. We had a Openreach engineer out the other day and he said there is no difference between ping and download speed which I refuse to believe.
Any help gratefully received.
Wiggly
Ping simply measures the round-trip time of a small packet of data between your computer and the target you are pinging. It has absolutely nothing at all to do with your download speed.
Think of it as a measure of the distance between you and the target, rather than a measure of how fat the pipe is.
Do your ping results indicate any packet loss? Try pinging your own router to see if the problem lies inside your own property. It might be that someone has set up a nearby wifi router on the same channel and it is causing interference (I have assumed that you are using wifi). Is anyone else using your network? Are you hosting a botnet? :}
Once you know the problem is not at home, you might also want to run a traceroute (or tracert on Windows). This will show you all the hops that exist between you and the target, and the ping for each of them. It will be obvious if one of them is very slow - though there is not a whole lot you can do about it.
Saab Dastard
20th Dec 2015, 11:20
Hyph,
You are quite right in what you say, but there is a bit of a wrinkle in that ICMP traffic (including ping) is usually given a lower (if not lowest) priority by ISPs and peering carriers, and is sometimes delayed or dropped entirely on busy links.
So delayed ping can indicate congestion on a link, which can also show as reduced throughput or download speed. The congestion can be caused by high traffic volumes or a fault.
If the ping response time from the same target has increased, then either the route distance has increased (which may occur if it has to route around a failed path), or there is congestion. Or both.
SD