‘Ping’ a way to measure Internet response time — and slow Web service

Life is not perfect, and sometimes your Internet speeds are going to be a lot slower than what you expect. But it’s not always a matter of your download and upload speeds. Sometimes ping can help narrow down the problem. But what is ping?

While broadband bandwidth — say, the 20 megabits per second download speeds your ISP may promise — is the maximum speed of your Internet service, ping measures in milliseconds how long it actually takes for an online server to respond to a request from you at a given moment. A high ping — say anything over 100ms — can mean that there is network congestion, a website is overloaded with traffic or, if you lived somewhere very remote, that it’s taking longer than usual to reach the server. This can be a concern in online action games, where a low ping rate can mean a competitive advantage. Sites like speedtest.net can show you your current Internet speed rates, as well as ping.