What Is a Good Ping? Latency, Jitter and Packet Loss Explained

What ping measures

Ping is the round-trip time between your device and another computer. The ping command sends a small packet, called an ICMP echo request, to a server and waits for the server to send an echo reply. The time between the two is the ping, measured in milliseconds (thousandths of a second). It is also called latency. A lower number means a shorter delay.

Ping is not speed. A connection that downloads at 1 gigabit a second can have a high ping, and a slow connection can have a low one. Bandwidth is how much data moves each second; ping is how long a single small message takes. Streaming a film depends mostly on bandwidth. A fast-action game, a video call and a remote desktop depend much more on ping.

Why a website cannot run a true ping

The ICMP packets that the ping command sends are not available to web pages, so a ping website has to measure something else. The ping test on this site times a small HTTPS request from your browser to one of 22 public servers and back. That includes the time to encrypt and for the server to answer, so it reads a few milliseconds higher than the ping command to the same machine. It is good for comparing regions and for spotting jitter and loss, and it only reaches the servers on its list. To test any other address, use the command yourself.

What counts as a good ping

There is no single number, because it depends on what you are doing. The table shows the thresholds the ping test uses. The first row is a published target; the others are common rules of thumb, which is how most advice on gaming ping works.

As a rough guide for everyday use, under 20 ms is excellent, 20 to 50 ms is very good, 50 to 100 ms is fine for most games, 100 to 150 ms is where lag becomes noticeable in fast games, and over 150 ms is poor for anything interactive. Slower-paced games, browsing and video streaming cope with much more.

Jitter and packet loss matter as much as the average

Jitter is how much the delay changes from one packet to the next, and packet loss is the share of packets that never arrive. The average hides both. Compare two lines with similar averages. One gives ten readings of 21 to 25 ms: an average of 23.0 ms and jitter of 2.0 ms. The other swings between 12 and 102 ms: an average of 54 ms but jitter of 81 ms. The second is rated poor for video calls and poor for games, even though its average looks moderate, because voices stutter and characters teleport when the delay jumps.

Loss is worse. Two lost readings out of ten, the same line as the steady one otherwise, is 20% loss and rates poor for calls on its own. Real-time apps cannot wait for a late packet to be sent again, so a lost one is a glitch. Microsoft’s target for Teams is under 1% loss in any 15-second window, jitter under 30 ms and a round trip under 100 ms from the user’s device.

Distance sets a minimum you cannot beat

Light in an optical fibre travels at about two thirds of its speed in a vacuum, or roughly 200 km every millisecond. A round trip covers the distance twice, so every 100 km of fibre costs about 1 ms of ping at the very least. Cables are never straight, and the signal passes through routers on the way, so real pings are higher.

This is why the nearest region is nearly always the best choice for a game or a call, and why no setting, router or “booster” can bring a trans-Pacific ping down to 20 ms. If your ping to a server on the same continent is far above the floor for that distance, the delay is coming from your network or your internet provider’s route rather than from distance.

Why your ping is high, and what to try

1. Test on a wired connection. Wi-Fi adds a few milliseconds and, in a crowded building, large swings in jitter and loss. Plugging in with a cable is the quickest way to find out whether Wi-Fi is the problem.
2. Stop other traffic. A download, a cloud backup or a video stream on the same network fills the connection’s queue and makes every other packet wait. This effect, often called bufferbloat, shows up as a ping that climbs the moment someone starts a large transfer. Run the test while a download is going and again when it is idle; a big gap means your router queues too much.
3. Turn off the VPN, or pick a nearer VPN server. A VPN sends your traffic on a detour, and the extra distance adds to every reading.
4. Restart the router and modem, which can clear a router that has been running for weeks, and move closer to it or off a crowded channel if you must use Wi-Fi.
5. Choose a nearer server. In a game, pick the region with the lowest ping rather than the default. In the ping test, “Compare all servers” ranks them for you.
6. Compare more than one server. If the ping is high to every region, the problem is on your side. If only one region is slow, the problem is on that route.
7. Ask your internet provider if loss or jitter stays high on a wired connection to several regions at different times of day. Give them the readings.

How to test properly

One reading means little. Take 20 or 30, do it at a quiet time and a busy one, and look at the average, the highest reading, the jitter and the loss together. In the browser, the ping test does this and draws a bar for each reading. For any particular address, open a terminal. On Windows the command is ping -n 20 example.com, and on macOS or Linux it is ping -c 20 example.com. Each line of output shows the time in milliseconds, and the summary at the end gives the lowest, average and highest and the percentage lost.

To find where a delay is introduced, trace the route: tracert example.com on Windows or traceroute example.com on macOS and Linux. It lists each router on the way with its own delay. A jump in one hop that stays high from there on points at the cause; a single slow hop that recovers is usually a router that deprioritises replies to the trace and is harmless. Some servers and networks do not answer ping at all, so a silent target is not proof that it is down.

Common questions

Sources

Reviewed on 20 Oct 2026 against the published sources below. Laws and prices change, so check the current position before you rely on a figure.

• Microsoft Learn: Teams network requirements (client to Microsoft network edge: latency round trip under 100 ms, jitter under 30 ms, packet loss under 1% in any 15 seconds)
• RFC 3550 (RTP), section 6.4.1: how interarrival jitter is defined
• RFC 792: Internet Control Message Protocol, the echo packets that the ping command sends

Only the video-call figures rest on a published requirement (Microsoft’s Teams targets). The bands for games, streaming and browsing are common rules of thumb and are labelled that way. The physical minimums are worked out from the speed of light in fibre and great-circle distances, so they are floors, not predictions. The example readings in this guide are made up to illustrate the idea.

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