What does ping mean?

Ping (latency is the technically more correct term) means the time it takes for a small data set to be transmitted from your device to a server on the Internet and back to your device again. 


The ping time is measured in milliseconds (ms). The ping time is a very important indicator for online games, but for quite normal Internet surfing to the ping time has a considerable effect on the access delay time. The delay is critically influenced both by your Internet access technology and by its utilization level. Note that ping refers to two-way latency (aka round-trip delay), a value relevant for Internet usage. Sometimes it is referred to as "one-way latencies" which account only for the access part, but not for the transmission in the whole network.


If you are accessing very far remote servers, the length of the transmission route also has a marked effect on the ping time (e.g. about 280 ms for Japan). Fast Internet connections have a ping time of less than 2 ms (optical fiber), slow Internet connections may have ping times of over 50 ms (UMTS access); typically ping times range from 5 to 30 ms.


What do Ping, Jitter, Download, Upload, and packet loss mean, and why are they important?


The ping is the reaction time of your connection–how fast you get a response after you've sent out a request. A fast ping means a more responsive connection, especially in applications where timing is everything (like video games). Ping is measured in milliseconds (ms).

The download speed is how fast you can pull data from the server to you. Most connections are designed to download much faster than they upload, since the majority of online activity, like loading web pages or streaming videos, consists of downloads. Download speed is measured in megabits per second (Mbps).

The upload speed is how fast you send data from you to others. Uploading is necessary for sending big files via email, or in using video-chat to talk to someone else online (since you have to send your video feed to them). Upload speed is measured in megabits per second (Mbps).

what does this ms ping mean on the speed test site?

can anyone tell me what the ms ping sign means when you go to the speediest website, it is in the bottom left-hand corner, I am getting different variations in my ping, one time it is as low as 68ms then if I do a test again it is up at 95 or something, is it better to get a low ping or a higher ping I am on a 10 MB broadband from virgin anyone shed some light on this ping thing to clarify for me and anyone else who was wondering about it:
Ping is the time it takes for what's called an Echo Request to be set to a remote host and then a response received by the sender this number is measured in Milliseconds.

A Millisecond is one-thousandth of a second, so in your example, let's say the remote host was a Server in London, it took your pc 95ms or approx 1/10 of a second to send a single request to this Server and get a response back.


There are many factors that affect your ping, such as distance from the server, current server/client activity (multiple tests at the same time), etc that's why it can fluctuate on each test.

Generally, lower is better but this Isn't really noticed if just browsing websites and downloading software, users who more notice lower ping replies are online games players (and I mean proper online games where high amounts of data are transmitted).


Though 68/95ms pings aint that cracking they are nothing to worry about it's more than sufficient.

If you want to see some examples of pings, if using Windows XP Click Start > Run, and in the box type in CMD and press enter. You will then be presented with a command prompt, type in "ping www.google.com" (excluding the quotes and again press enter. Your pc will then go on to ping google 4 times and display some results of how long it has taken for your pc to contact google.com.

So for me, mine was
Minumum = 29ms, Maximum = 30ms, Average = 29ms

If you are really interested you can even see how many Hops (number of devices you request passes through to get to the destination).


Again from some cmd prompt type in excluding the quotes "tracer www.google.com".

This, of course, works for any address, if you get no response it doesn't mean that you can't contact the site it just could mean that the specific sites have been set up to not respond to pings, etc.

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