Fiber. Gotta love it.
I knew the barebones def there--what I don't know is why I'd care about it as an end user, and what things besides distance might affect it. (The nonrandom sample here does not seem to show a strong correlation between distance from a server and a slow ping speed.)
Its an important piece of information for every internet user.
Higher ping/latency = longer amount of time for information to arrive at a location, which has adverse affects on realtime applications, most notably games, where packets need to arrive at their destination in as few ms as possible.
Generally, any more than 80ms and games come tumbling down, some are more tolerant than others but that largely depends on the type of game.
Distance is the biggest factor contributing to higher latency, which is why you generally want to play on servers and with people close to you. But also things like packet loss (a HUGE problem for any wireless connection), "noisy" lines and bottlenecked connections are big contributors aswell.
[URL=http://www.speedtest.net][/URL]
This is just a thread for showing off... Brad has posted that pic on Gal Civ 2 forums too
I can tell you as a user who always has pings of 100+ that such a statement is amazingly incorrect. Most people are afraid of 'high' pings because they only know the basic idea "higher ping means higher lag time", but in fact, a game can still be quite functional with 15+ users whose pings are all above 300. Ask anyone who's played WoW, Warcraft III, Left 4 Dead, Demigod, or Halo on an Asian server.
Edit: I failed to address the original question about ping, sorry 'bout that.
Simply put, the higher your ping, the longer the response time to the server is. If your ping is 1000, you will have at least a full 1-2 second delay from your input on your keyboard to your character's reaction, depending on the server type of the game in question. P2P games, as I understand it, don't lower ping so much as lower the time delay by not having everyone work through the Host (which would double the distance between players, frequently). Does that make more sense?
I hate this compagnie. Can't wait to move an dbe back on Videotron
I want FIOS .
Lol...
Note I am in a 3rd world country.
http://www.speedtest.net/result/473838298.png
Aah yes, bankrupt charter.
Then again, who cares about speed if you don't use it? Try to beat my 3.4 Tb upload in one month
http://img31.imageshack.us/my.php?image=trafficf.gif
And by the way, this test is somewhat misleading, i do have a 30/30 Mbit connection and i have no trouble uploading that fast to torrents/DC++, to multiple peers of course.
You can't know when your packet arrived to another computer so it's actually a round-trip time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ping
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