What Is a Good Ping? Latency Explained for Gaming & Video Calls
Ping is the single number that decides whether a video call feels natural or a game feels fair. Bandwidth barely matters here — a 1 Gbps plan and a 100 Mbps plan on the same line have the same ping. What matters is time , and specifically three kinds of it: latency, jitter, and bufferbloat.
Latency is the one-way time for a packet to travel from your device to a server. Ping measures the round-trip: your packet out, the server's reply back. Roughly:
Physics sets a floor — light in fiber travels roughly 200,000 km/s, so New York to London is at minimum ~28 ms one-way. The rest is routing hops, WiFi, and queuing.
On this page
- Quick answer: what counts as a good ping?
- Latency: what ping actually measures
- Jitter: why steady ping matters more than low ping
- Bufferbloat: the hidden ping killer
- How to measure your ping properly
- Ping targets by activity
- Competitive gaming
- Video and voice calls
- How to improve ping
- Bottom line
- What is a good ping?
- What is a good ping for gaming?
Jitter is how much ping varies between consecutive packets. A steady 80 ms feels better on a video call than a 40 ms average that bounces between 20 ms and 250 ms — the second one causes audio dropouts and rubber-banding in games.
Jitter almost always comes from WiFi interference, a saturated uplink, or bufferbloat.
Bufferbloat is what makes your ping jump from 20 ms to 500 ms the second anyone in the house starts a Zoom call, a game download, or a cloud backup. Routers buffer packets when the link is busy — old routers use huge buffers that queue traffic for hundreds of milliseconds before sending it.
Symptom: your idle ping is fine, but every time upload gets busy, ping spikes 10–30× and stays high until the transfer ends. Full explainer and fixes in the bufferbloat guide — the short version is enable SQM, Smart Queue, or Adaptive QoS in your router.
A single ping number is close to useless. Measure three things:
Test to the actual server that matters: the game's regional server, your Zoom data center, or the nearest Cloudflare edge. Ping to Google is meaningless if your game routes through a different network.
Full step-by-step fixes in how to reduce ping and, for competitive play, reduce ping for gaming .
Good ping is under 50 ms for gaming and under 150 ms for calls, with jitter under 30 ms and no bufferbloat spikes when the network is busy. If your idle ping is fine but loaded ping is terrible, fix bufferbloat first — it's the single biggest cause of "my internet feels laggy even though the speed test looks fast".
Key points
- Under 20 ms — excellent. Local server or fiber.
- 20–50 ms — good. Competitive gaming is comfortable.
- 50–100 ms — acceptable for most games and every video call.
- 100–150 ms — noticeable delay. FPS games start to feel unfair.
- 150–300 ms — poor. Calls talk-over each other; games are unplayable competitively.
- Over 300 ms — broken. Usually satellite, congested WiFi, or a saturated uplink.
- Coast-to-coast in the US: 60–80 ms
- Geostationary satellite: 500–700 ms (Starlink, being low-orbit, is 25–60 ms)
- Under 5 ms jitter — imperceptible
- 5–30 ms — fine for calls, noticeable in fast games
- 30–100 ms — call audio starts breaking up
- Over 100 ms — calls are painful, games unplayable
- Idle ping — no other traffic running. Use our ping test or run ping 1.1.1.1 from a terminal for 30 seconds.
- Loaded ping (bufferbloat) — ping to the same target while a big upload is running. If it jumps by more than 50 ms, you have bufferbloat.
Frequently asked questions
- What is a good ping?: Under 20 ms is excellent, 20–50 ms is good, 50–100 ms is acceptable for most games and calls, 100–150 ms starts to feel laggy, and above 150 ms is poor. Competitive shooters want sub-30 ms; video calls stay smooth up to about 150 ms.
- What is a good ping for gaming?: For competitive FPS (Valorant, CS2, Fortnite, Apex): under 30 ms. For MOBAs and shooters: under 50 ms. For MMOs, strategy, and turn-based games: under 100 ms is fine. Fighting games are the strictest — 20 ms or less.
- What is a good ping for Zoom or video calls?: Under 150 ms one-way (about 300 ms round-trip) is Zoom's threshold for a smooth call. Jitter under 30 ms matters more than raw ping — jittery 40 ms is worse than steady 80 ms.
- Is 0 ms ping possible?: No. Even a LAN cable has 1–2 ms of latency, and light itself takes about 5 ms to cross the US. Anything reporting 0 ms is a rounding artifact.
- What's the difference between ping, latency, and jitter?: Latency is one-way delay; ping is a round-trip measurement of it; jitter is how much ping varies between packets. Low ping with high jitter still makes calls and games feel broken.
- Does higher download speed reduce ping?: No. A 1 Gbps plan and a 100 Mbps plan on the same fiber line have the same ping. Latency depends on distance, routing, and queuing — not throughput.
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