Ping is the round trip time for a small packet of data to travel from your device to a server and back, measured in milliseconds. It measures delay, not capacity.

Under 30 ms is excellent, 30 to 60 ms is good, 60 to 100 ms is noticeable in calls and games, and above 100 ms will feel laggy no matter how much bandwidth you have.

How do I lower my ping?

Use an Ethernet cable rather than Wi-Fi, stop other devices from saturating your connection, restart your router, and choose game or call servers that are geographically closer to you. Ping is largely governed by physical distance, which you cannot change.

What is ping, and what is a good one?

Q: Is ping the same as latency?

In everyday use they are used interchangeably. Latency is the general term for delay, and ping is the specific round trip measurement most tools report.

Updated 14 July 2026

Short answer. Ping is how long a small packet takes to reach a server and come back, measured in milliseconds. It measures delay, not capacity. Under 30 ms is excellent. 30–60 ms is good. Above 100 ms, video calls and games feel laggy no matter how many megabits you are paying for. Bandwidth is how wide the road is; ping is how long the road is.

Why a fast connection can still feel slow

Bandwidth and latency are entirely different things, and people conflate them constantly.

Imagine a lorry full of hard drives driving across the country. Its bandwidth is enormous — more data than your fibre line moves in a week. Its latency is two days. It is a superb way to move a petabyte and a hopeless way to have a conversation.

Your internet works the same way. A 500 Mbps connection with 120 ms ping will feel worse on a video call than a 50 Mbps connection with 15 ms ping. The road is wider; it is just much longer.

What counts as good

Ping	How it feels
Under 20 ms	Indistinguishable from instant. Competitive gaming is comfortable.
20–60 ms	Good. Calls and games feel responsive.
60–100 ms	Noticeable. Conversations start to overlap awkwardly.
100–200 ms	Laggy. People interrupt each other on calls constantly.
Over 200 ms	Painful. Real-time anything becomes a struggle.

Check your ping →

What drives it

Physical distance. Light in fibre travels roughly 200 km per millisecond. A server 2,000 km away costs you 20 ms in each direction before anything else happens. You cannot negotiate with physics.
Wi-Fi. Typically adds 2–10 ms, and far more on a congested band. Ethernet adds almost nothing.
Congestion. When a link is full, packets queue. This is why ping climbs at 9pm.
Connection type. Fibre is the best. Cable is good. Satellite is terrible — geostationary satellites impose 500 ms or more purely from the distance to orbit and back.

How to lower it

Plug in. Ethernet is the single biggest win available to most people.
Stop background traffic. A saturated line queues packets, and queued packets are latency.
Restart the router. Genuinely helps more often than it should.
Pick closer servers in games and calls, where the option exists.
Accept the floor. If your provider's network takes 40 ms to reach anywhere, 40 ms is your floor, and no setting will beat it.

Common questions

Is ping the same as latency?

In everyday use, yes. Latency is the general term for delay; ping is the specific round-trip measurement most tools report.

Does more bandwidth lower ping?

No. Upgrading from 100 to 500 Mbps will not reduce your ping at all, unless your line was so congested that packets were queueing.

What is jitter?

Jitter is how much your ping varies between packets. Steady 60 ms is far better for a call than a ping bouncing between 20 ms and 200 ms, because the variation is what causes audio to break up.