High ping is the number one complaint of online gamers and of anyone who lives on video calls. Your character "teleports", voices arrive late, clicks don't seem to register. The good news: in most cases the cause is inside your home and the fix is simple.
What ping is, in one sentence
Ping is the time, in milliseconds (ms), that a packet takes to travel from your device to a server and back. The lower it is, the faster the response. It isn't directly tied to the speed you pay for: a 1 Gbps connection can have bad ping, and a 50 Mbps connection can have excellent ping.
What number is good?
- Up to 30 ms: excellent. Typical for servers in the same city or region.
- 30 to 80 ms: good for almost all games and calls.
- 80 to 150 ms: fine for browsing and video; already noticeable in competitive games.
- Above 150 ms: noticeable lag in anything interactive.
Two measurements matter as much as the average: variation (jitter), which is how much the ping fluctuates, and packet loss. An average ping of 40 ms with spikes to 300 ms plays worse than a steady 70 ms.
The most common causes
1. Wi-Fi
It's the most frequent culprit. Walls, distance from the router, microwaves, neighboring networks on the same channel and lots of connected devices all increase latency and, above all, variation. Try it: measure on your phone over Wi-Fi, then on your computer over a cable. The difference is often surprising.
2. Busy network
When someone at home streams 4K video, downloads a game or uploads a cloud backup, the packet queue in the router grows and your ping goes up with it. This has a name, bufferbloat, and it explains ping that "blows up" only at certain times of day.
3. Distance to the server
Light in fiber is fast, but not instantaneous. Between South America and the United States, ping naturally sits between 100 and 160 ms; between the US and Europe, roughly 80 to 150 ms depending on the coast. No tweak at home changes that. In games, always pick the server in your region.
4. Your ISP's routing
Sometimes the path to a destination takes unnecessary detours, going through another state or even another country. A traceroute shows where the latency jumps. If the problem is outside your home, only your ISP can fix it.
5. Overloaded device or router
Old or cheap routers choke on many simultaneous connections. On your computer, background updates, antivirus software and sync apps also use the network without you noticing.
How to lower your ping, in order of impact
- Use an Ethernet cable on your computer or console. It's the change that cuts variation and loss the most.
- If you need Wi-Fi, use the 5 GHz band and stay close to the router. Change the channel if there are many neighboring networks.
- Pause downloads and updates while you play, on every device in the house.
- Turn on QoS or SQM on your router, if it has them. These features prioritize interactive traffic and fight bufferbloat.
- Restart your modem and router if ping suddenly went up and stayed high.
- Pick the closest server in the game or app.
- Contact your ISP if, even on a cable and with the network idle, you still see packet loss or constantly high ping. Bring your test results: they help support troubleshoot.
Does a VPN lower ping?
Almost never. A VPN adds a detour to the path, so ping normally goes up. It only helps in the rare case where your ISP's route to a certain destination is very bad and the VPN's route is better. Test with and without it to compare.
How to measure the right way
Measure at different times of day, with and without a cable, and write down the average, variation and loss. A single test doesn't say much; the comparison says everything. With TestePing's ping test you can measure the latency from your connection to our server and the ping from our server to any website or IP.