What is a good ping, and how to lower yours

Download speed, measured in megabits per second, is how much data your line can move at once. Ping, measured in milliseconds, is how long a single piece of data takes to get to a server and back. One is the width of the pipe, the other is the delay in the pipe. A fat pipe with a long delay still feels laggy, which is why a gigabit connection can have worse ping than a modest one and feel slower in a game.

Ping matters anywhere timing matters: online gaming, video calls, live trading, anything where you do a thing and expect an instant response. For streaming a film or downloading a file, ping barely registers, because those just need the pipe to be wide. For a shooter, ping is everything. You can measure yours in seconds with our ping test, and the rest of this guide is about reading that number and bringing it down.

Ping is one of the few internet numbers where lower is always better, and the bands are simple.

Under 20 ms is excellent, the level competitive gamers chase, where your inputs feel instant. Between 20 and 50 ms is good, and where most people on a decent home connection sit for UK game servers. From 50 to 100 ms is fine for casual play and unnoticeable for video calls, but a serious player will feel it. Above 100 ms you start to see real lag, the half-beat between pressing the button and the thing happening, and over 150 ms competitive play becomes a fight against your own connection. For a video call, anything under about 150 ms feels natural, so ping is rarely the call-killer that wifi drop-outs are.

High ping has a handful of usual causes, and most of them are not your broadband line at all.

The biggest is distance to the server. Data travels fast but not instantly, so a game server in another country adds real milliseconds no fix can remove. Picking a server near you is often the single largest improvement available. The second is wifi: a wireless signal adds latency and jitter that a cable does not, and switching to a wired connection typically strips 10 to 30 ms straight off your ping. The third is congestion, a busy household with someone streaming 4K or running a big download is stealing the responsiveness your game needs. And the fourth is the connection type itself, which sets a floor we will come to.

Old kit plays a part too. A router that has been on for months, or a cheap one struggling with a houseful of devices, adds delay of its own. If your ping is high everywhere and all the time, the cause is usually local, and the fixes for speeding up your broadband bring ping down with them.

The good news is that most of what lowers ping is free, and you can do it in the next ten minutes.

Plug in. A wired ethernet connection is the single biggest win for anyone serious about ping, and on a console or gaming PC that sits in one place there is no reason not to. Pick the nearest server in the game's settings, because no amount of home tinkering beats cutting the distance the data travels. Close the background, pause downloads, kick the 4K stream off for the session and stop ten devices fighting over the line. Reboot the router if it has been up for weeks, since a tired router adds latency like a tired everything else.

Beyond that, turning on QoS, the setting that lets a router prioritise gaming traffic, can help a busy household, and keeping your devices and router firmware up to date trims the odd stubborn millisecond. What will not help is buying a faster package in the hope it cuts ping, because past a sensible speed the download number and the ping number are unrelated. If you are slow everywhere as well as laggy, that is a speed problem, and a different one. Run the ping test before and after each change so you can see what actually moved the needle.

There is a limit to how low you can go, and it is set by the kind of connection coming into your house. This is the part where your broadband genuinely matters.

Full fibre has the lowest latency of the lot, often just a few milliseconds on the line itself, because light moving through glass is about as quick as it gets and there is no ageing copper in the way. Old part-copper FTTC lines add more delay, and they wobble more under load. 5G home broadband and especially satellite are higher again, sometimes dramatically so, because the signal has further and messier distances to travel. So if you have done everything above and your ping is still stubbornly high on every server, your connection type may be the ceiling, in which case it is worth knowing which line you are on and what you can move to. Moving from copper or 5G to full fibre will not fix a distant server or a wifi problem, but it does lower the floor your best-case ping can reach.

If that is your situation, here is a spread of live full-fibre deals, the connection that gives ping the best possible start, from the cheapest going to the fastest.