Ping & Jitter Explained: What’s a Good Ping?
Ping is the time it takes data to reach a server and come back, in milliseconds (ms). Jitter is how much that time jumps around. For gaming and video calls, a good ping is under 50 ms, jitter should stay under 20 ms, and packet loss should be 0%.
What is ping?
Ping, also called latency, measures delay rather than speed. Imagine a motorway: bandwidth (Mbps) is how many lanes it has, while ping is how long one car takes to drive there and back. A fast plan with high ping still feels laggy in games, because every action waits for the round trip.
Ping depends mostly on distance to the server, your WiFi, and how busy your connection is. Fibre typically pings 5–20 ms to a nearby server, cable 10–30 ms, 4G/5G 20–60 ms, and satellite 30–600+ ms depending on the type.
What is a good ping for gaming?
| Ping | Rating | In practice |
|---|---|---|
| 0–20 ms | Excellent | Ideal for competitive shooters and fighting games |
| 20–50 ms | Good | Smooth for every type of game |
| 50–100 ms | Fair | Fine for casual and strategy games; fast shooters feel a little delayed |
| 100–150 ms | Slow | Noticeable lag and late hit registration |
| 150 ms+ | Poor | Rubber-banding and frustration |
The ping shown in your game is to the game server, which may be in another country. Picking the nearest server region in the game’s settings is often the quickest win.
What is jitter?
Jitter is the variation in ping from one moment to the next. A connection that pings 30, 31, 29, 30 ms has almost no jitter. One that pings 20, 90, 25, 140 ms has high jitter, even though its best ping is lower.
Jitter hurts real-time apps most. Video calls buffer audio to smooth it out, so high jitter causes robotic voices, frozen video and people talking over each other. In games it shows up as stutter and warping.
- Under 10 ms: excellent
- 10–20 ms: good
- 20–50 ms: noticeable on calls and in games
- Over 50 ms: poor
What is packet loss?
Packet loss is data that never arrives. A web page simply re-sends it and you barely notice, but a game or call can’t wait, so lost packets mean skipped frames, glitchy audio or your character teleporting. Anything above 0% on a wired connection is worth investigating; 1–2% on WiFi already causes stutter.
What causes high ping and jitter?
- WiFi interference or weak signal: the most common cause of jitter. Test with a cable to compare. See what is a good WiFi signal strength.
- A busy connection: someone streaming, downloading or backing up. If ping only spikes when the line is busy, that’s bufferbloat.
- Distance to the game or call server.
- Your provider’s network at peak times, usually evenings.
How to measure them
The ping test sends one ping a second and shows ping, jitter and packet loss live on a graph. Leave it running in “Keep monitoring” mode during a game or call to catch spikes. The main speed test also reports ping and jitter alongside download and upload.
Ready to fix it? Follow how to reduce ping for gaming.