Ping Test: Measure Latency, Jitter & Packet Loss
A ping test measures the round-trip time for a small packet to reach a server and come back. Aim for under 30 ms with jitter under 10 ms for competitive gaming, under 100 ms with jitter under 30 ms for video calls, and 0-0.5% packet loss either way.
FastSpeedTest reports ping and jitter as part of every speed test: press Start on the home page and the latency phase runs first, before the download and upload measurements.
Ping is the single best indicator of how responsive a connection feels, far more so than the headline Mbps number. A 1 Gbps line with 150 ms ping feels sluggish; a 50 Mbps line at 12 ms feels instant.
On this page
- How to run a ping test here
- What good ping looks like
- Jitter: when your ping won't sit still
- Packet loss: when packets never arrive
- What is actually making your ping high
- Bringing your ping down
- How FastSpeedTest measures ping
- What is a good ping?
- What is the difference between ping and jitter?
- How much packet loss is acceptable?
- Why is my ping high even on fast internet?
Jitter is how much your ping varies between consecutive measurements. A connection with 20 ms ping and 1 ms jitter feels solid; one with 20 ms ping and 30 ms jitter stutters on calls and rubber-bands in games, because real-time applications cannot compensate for the variation. Aim for jitter under 10 ms for gaming and under 30 ms for video calls.
Packet loss is the percentage of packets that vanish, forcing applications to retransmit and producing hiccups and stutters. Zero to 0.5% is normal. Above 1% on a wired connection is a genuine fault, usually a damaged cable, an overheating modem or a congested WiFi channel. On mobile, up to 1% is normal in weak coverage and above 3% makes video calls drop.
Our engine sends 12 small HTTP requests to Cloudflare's nearest edge after a TCP/TLS warmup, drops the worst 20% of samples to remove outliers, and reports the average as ping plus an RFC 3550-style mean absolute deviation as jitter. Because the warmup happens first, you are measuring the network rather than connection setup. Full detail is in our methodology .
One honest limitation: a browser cannot send ICMP packets, so this is an HTTP round-trip measurement. It tracks command-line ping closely but is not identical, and it measures latency to a Cloudflare edge rather than to a specific game server.
Key points
- Open the home page and press Start. Nothing is measured until you do.
- The latency phase runs first: the ping and jitter cards fill in before download and upload begin.
- Run it three times and use the median. A single sample can be distorted by one busy moment on your network.
- For a fair reading, connect by Ethernet and pause downloads, backups and video calls on other devices.
- Distance. Physics sets a floor of roughly 5 ms per 1,000 km, plus router hops along the way.
- WiFi quality. A weak signal adds 20-80 ms of jitter even when the line itself is idle.
- Bufferbloat. Your modem queues packets when the upload saturates, so ping climbs during uploads. Test ping under load .
- ISP routing. Some providers hand traffic off at distant peering points, adding tens of milliseconds.
- Background apps. Cloud backups and game updates flood the upstream and push latency up.
- Use Ethernet instead of WiFi — it removes most jitter in one step.
- Pick game and call servers in your own region; distance is the largest single factor.
- Enable QoS or SQM on the router to control bufferbloat.
- Restart the modem if ping suddenly worsened; DOCSIS modems can drift.
- Try a different DNS resolver to cut lookup latency, which affects how fast pages start loading even when ping is fine.
Frequently asked questions
- What is a good ping?: Under 20 ms is excellent, 20-50 ms is great for online gaming, 50-100 ms is fine for video calls and browsing, 100-200 ms is workable for streaming, and above 200 ms makes anything live feel delayed.
- What is the difference between ping and jitter?: Ping is the round-trip time of a single packet. Jitter is how much that ping varies between consecutive samples. A line with 20 ms ping and 30 ms jitter feels worse than a steady 90 ms line, because real-time apps cannot compensate for the variation.
- How much packet loss is acceptable?: Zero to 0.5% is normal. Anything above 1% on a wired connection is a real problem and usually indicates a faulty cable, an overheating modem or a congested WiFi channel. Above 3% video calls start dropping.
- Why is my ping high even on fast internet?: Ping is set by distance, WiFi quality, router queueing (bufferbloat) and ISP routing, none of which improve when you buy a faster plan. A 1 Gbps line with a saturated upload buffer can have worse ping than a 50 Mbps line that is idle.
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