What this ping test measures
Ping is the time a small packet takes to leave your device, reach a server and come back, measured in milliseconds. This ping test sends a stream of UDP packets to the nearest Cloudflare edge, one every 20 milliseconds, and times every single one. The big number is the median, the middle value of the run, which is the ping you will actually feel most of the time. The strip shows each packet individually, so you can see whether that ping is steady or whether it jumps around.
Most ping tests send a handful of packets and report an average. An average hides exactly the thing that makes a connection feel bad: one packet at 300 ms among twenty at 30 ms barely moves the mean, but in a game it is the moment you got shot. The detail panel under the result lists your lowest, average, 95th percentile and highest ping. The gap between the lowest and the 95th percentile is the honest measure of how consistent your connection is.
What counts as a good ping
Those bands are for the ping to a server near you, which is what this test measures. Your ping to a particular game server adds the distance to it: roughly 1 ms for every 100 km of fibre each way, plus every router in between. If this test shows 15 ms and a game server on another continent shows 150 ms, the difference is geography, not a problem with your line. There is a longer explanation in what is a good ping.
| Ping | What it feels like |
|---|---|
| Under 20 ms | Excellent. Typical of fibre and good cable close to a major city. |
| 20 to 50 ms | Good for anything, including competitive shooters. |
| 50 to 100 ms | Fine for most games and every kind of call. Fast shooters start to feel it. |
| 100 to 150 ms | Noticeable delay in games; calls are still fine. |
| Over 150 ms | Laggy. Conversations start to overlap on calls. |
Ping to game servers around the world
The main test tells you how good your own line is. The region check under it answers the other half of the question: how far away each part of the world is from you. Press "Test all regions" and it times a handful of requests to 17 data centre regions run by Amazon Web Services, from Virginia and Oregon to Frankfurt, Mumbai, Tokyo and Sydney. A large share of online games, voice chat services and video platforms host their servers in exactly these regions, so the numbers are a good guide to the ping you will see when you pick a server location in a game.
Each region gets four requests. The first is thrown away, because it has to look up the address and set up an encrypted connection, which takes several times longer than the round trip itself. The lowest of the remaining three is shown. These are HTTPS requests rather than UDP packets, so they include a millisecond or two of server processing and they cannot measure packet loss, but for comparing regions against each other they are accurate. Use it to choose a server region: anything under about 50 ms is great for fast games, and under 100 ms is comfortable for most.
Why ping over UDP instead of the ping command
The ping command on your computer uses ICMP, a separate protocol that many routers deliberately treat as low priority. A busy router may delay or drop ICMP while forwarding game traffic perfectly, which makes the command look worse than reality; other networks prioritise it and make things look better than they are. This test uses UDP, the same kind of traffic games and calls send, at the same rate they send it, so the number reflects the traffic you care about.
The packets are small, 160 bytes, and the whole test uses a few hundred kilobytes. That matters because a ping test that also downloads a large file measures the delay your own download causes, not the delay of your connection at rest. To see what happens to your ping under load, see bufferbloat.
If your ping is high
- Run the test on an Ethernet cable. Wifi adds a few milliseconds at best and tens of milliseconds when the signal is weak or the channel is crowded.
- Pause other traffic on the network. An upload in progress, such as a cloud photo backup, is the single most common cause of a ping that is suddenly double its usual value.
- Check the time of day. Ping that climbs every evening and recovers overnight is congestion on your provider's network.
- If you are on satellite or mobile data, a higher baseline is normal. Geostationary satellite adds around 600 ms by physics alone; low-orbit services like Starlink typically sit between 25 and 60 ms.
Step-by-step fixes, in the order worth trying them, are in how to lower your ping.