For gaming, a good ping is under 50 ms, and under 30 ms for competitive shooters. Anything over 100 ms is felt as lag. Ping matters more than download speed for online play.

Ping, jitter and packet loss

Ping is delay, jitter is how much that delay wobbles, and packet loss is data that never arrives. All three cause rubber-banding; bandwidth fixes none of them.

How to lower your ping

Go wired, pick the closest server region, close background downloads, and switch to 5 GHz WiFi if you can’t use Ethernet. Re-test between changes.

Test it

Run the gaming speed test and watch the ping and jitter tiles rather than the headline Mbps.