Ping Latency

[foxhole]

How important is this for a good broadband connection.?
I have had problems with broadband connection [sky] so they asked BT to look at my connection and found the wiring from pole to house needed replacement, after which my broadband speed doubled to over 5mb. But although quicker now downloads are still inconsistent and pause frequently, I did a number of speed tests using the BT site and it quotes Ping latency which I have read should ideally be under 30m/sec but the results I have vary wildly from 40 to over 500.?

 

[kjacko]

Adsl products are flakey at best, unless you live directly next door to the damned exchange.
<30ms, as said is desirable, but spiking up to 500ms? hmmm....not good.
Is it all the time?
Contention ratio plays a part as does bandwith, network resources etc.
So rather than using a speedtesting website, which could have loads of users hitting it at the same time, try using a command line to actually ping a site.
eg,
ping bbc.co.uk -t
or
ping 8.8.8.8 -t
or even ping your DNS servers (get them from ipconfig/all)
The -t switch will give a continuous ping to the domain/IP address, rather than just the standard 4 packet response, so that you can test it over a period of time.

Hope it helps a little.

 

[foxhole]

Tried the ping 8.8.8.8 -t and it returned results around the 50ms mark [+/- 10ms] with very occasional 70-100mm spike. Should it be a fairly steady result?

 

[Monkeh]

That's a pretty normal result, especially from a Windows box.

 

[foxhole]

From an Apple mac.Maybe I should run when I am downloading see if it varies then.

 

[Monkeh]

From an Apple mac.Maybe I should run when I am downloading see if it varies then.

Hmm, didn't think OS X was as bad for latency as Windows.

Then again, that's also a pretty normal result for an interleaved ADSL connection, so..

And it will vary more if you're downloading, or especially uploading.