Help with ping times?

[King_PIN]

Can someone please help me find out the proper way to test my ping? 

My isp tells me to use speedtest.net where I get a 1ms ping.  

Fast.com shows a 36ms ping. 

When I went through a guide and did it through command prompt to googles servers 8.8.8.8 and also my isp I get around 26ms.  

I'm on fiber if it matters.  

 

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

What do you want to test your ping to? Your testing to all different servers, so different ping times are expected. Ping is to anouther server, so it depends on what your testing your ping to.

[fUnDaMeNtAl_knobhead]

Do a internet test from ookla

[King_PIN]

3 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

What do you want to test your ping to? Your testing to all different servers, so different ping times are expected. Ping is to anouther server, so it depends on what your testing your ping to.

That's a good question and not one I know how to answer.  

My problem is before my isp told me to use fast.com for speed tests. 

Now they want me to use speedtest.net.  

How do I know what I should be using? 

[Electronics Wizardy]

4 minutes ago, King_PIN said:

That's a good question and not one I know how to answer.  

My problem is before my isp told me to use fast.com for speed tests. 

Now they want me to use speedtest.net.  

How do I know what I should be using? 

What is your goal with the speed test? A good amount of those times those speed tests are close to your ISP so they will show a best case senario that a lot of other sites won't be able to hit.

 

Fast.com is often better as its using Netflix's servers, so its often more realistic.

[King_PIN]

8 minutes ago, fUnDaMeNtAl_knobhead said:

Do a internet test from ookla

I get a 1 or 2ms ping whan I go there. 

 

[kirashi]

9 minutes ago, King_PIN said:

That's a good question and not one I know how to answer.  

My problem is before my isp told me to use fast.com for speed tests. 

Now they want me to use speedtest.net.  

How do I know what I should be using? 

You should always use multiple speedtest sites, testing multiple servers at multiple times of the day. Speeds and ping times can vary depending on a wide variety of factors that impact internet traffic throughout the day.

 

The real question here is what problem are you trying to solve? Lower ping is obviously better, but in general anything between 20-50ms is relatively decent when it comes to regular web browsing or day to day internet usage.

 

As @Electronics Wizardy noted, most ISP's run their own Ookla Speedtest appliances directly in their headends, or may have a direct peering agreement with Ookla themselves, resulting in crazy good speeds & pings.

[fUnDaMeNtAl_knobhead]

The further you are from the server more ping so Ookla might have a closer server to you than netflix and I also found trying many speed tests that fast.com reports about 10megabits slower in the internet speed.

[PyCCo_TyPuCTo]

As others said, what problem are you having, or what problem are you trying to solve?

If you just want to know the time it takes for a packet to go to an IP and come back - that's what ping command does, nothing else. Your results will depend on a number of factors:

 - distance to server

 - how busy is server (ping replies are down at the bottom of priority ques)

 - your own link utilization, if you're saturating, latency is gona go up.

 

If you just want to test your Internet connection, just use whatever speedtest you can find, run a bunch of them, find the one that's closest to you (lowest ping, sounds like it's speedtest.net in your case) 

"ping" is not something that your internet connection has that can be measured, it's just a command to send a packet to a IP address and if the destination replies, it will measure the time it takes to come back and show on your screen. So depending what you ping, you'll get different RTT (round-trip time). Naturally, the speedtest.net picks the closest server to you so you can get the best result on the bandwidth test.

 

Some reading for you:

https://www.cloudflare.com/en-ca/learning/cdn/glossary/round-trip-time-rtt/

[JogerJ]

Your ping times look fine. If you want a more thorough ping try ping -t 8.8.8.8

-t option == until stopped. So maybe you don't notice a hiccup when you just ping 4 times. Have it running in the background, when you encounter lag in-game, you can alt-tab to it and see if the return time increases. If it does, it's your internet. If it doesn't, it's your game (servers).

[Timothy003]

Speedtest is okay, but it only tests your ping when the network is idle. Pings usually increase whenever the full bandwidth is used. If you do any online gaming or conferencing, you'll want to make sure your ping stays low even when others are using the internet.

 

The easiest way to test this is with the Bufferbloat Test by Waveform. It runs right in your browser, just like Speedtest, but it also tests your ping while downloading and uploading and assigns a letter grade based on the results. If you get an A, you're golden.

[King_PIN]

Thanks everyone for the help.  

I understand what and how ping works a lot better now.  

What got me questioning what was happening was how the isp had me doing speed tests on one site and pings on another.  

I thought maybe something was up.  

That's the reason I tried doing it through the command prompt and when I saw pings in the 25-30ms area and other people in the neighbourhood and the isp told me it should be 1-2ms (which it is on ookla) I was questioning something was up.  

The other thing I didn't mention was the installer seemed kinda lazy and not the sharpest knife in the drawer LOL  so I just wanted to double check everything.  

I live in the country and have been getting terrible internet for 7 years now.  10 down 2 up.  So getting here fiber now I'm just making sure everything is prim and proper the way it should be. 

 

[Timothy003]

Your installation is fine. It's probably an issue between your ISP and another network. You can confirm this with traceroute.

 

If your neighbors get lower pings to the same hosts at the same time, you might just be unlucky and have an IP address with suboptimal routing. You can try getting a new address by power-cycling your router.

[PyCCo_TyPuCTo]

On 2/5/2022 at 12:53 AM, King_PIN said:

other people in the neighbourhood and the isp told me it should be 1-2ms (which it is on ookla) I was questioning something was up.  

So to check for latency on your fiber connection to the ISPs Network, use "tracert 8.8.8.8" command. This will not only ping the destination, but every hop along the way.

 - Your first hop will be your default gateway, and you should have <1ms there because the router ISP gave you is right there in your house.

 - Second hop will be your ISP and the ping will vary during the day, the router will reply, but if it's super busy, it will take its' time before replying.

This doesn't affect your experience with browsing/streaming/gaming etc, as the router is going to route user data before it replies to traces/pings. Pings are low priority. User data is higher priority.

So having said that, your trace results will vary greatly depending on time of day. It's normal to have second hop take longer to answer than 3rd and 4th - perfectly fine.

 

Installers normally just use a speedtest.net on their laptop to verify the connection is up to speed with what you're paying for. So going back to your original message, I'd say you can rest assured your fiber is installed properly.

 

You can use PingPlotter for 14 days I believe for free. Try it out, get it running on your machine for a few days non stop to different IPs, like 8.8.8.8 and 1.1.1.1 and it shows you a graph of how the round-trip time changes and if there is any packet loss.