A multiplayer game sends tiny packets back and forth and uses almost no bandwidth, so your ping is what counts. Under 20 ms is excellent, 20 to 50 ms is good and over 100 ms is where you feel the delay between your thumb and the screen. Jitter, the wobble between readings, matters just as much, because a steady ping beats a low one that spikes and it is the spikes that get you killed. Upload earns its place if you stream or party-chat while you play, since that is your line sending out. Download, the number every advert leads with, only decides how fast a 90GB update lands, not how the game itself feels.

A gigabit line does not lower your ping, and the game cannot use the bandwidth, so the giant number does nothing once you are in the lobby. What sets your ping is the kind of line and how you are wired to it, not the tier you pay for. Full fibre has the lowest latency of any home connection and holds it steady when the whole street piles on in the evening, where older lines wobble. Cable broadband gives big download numbers but a lower upload cap and slightly higher latency, so it is fine for solo play and downloads but not the sharpest for competitive multiplayer. A modest full-fibre package beats a top-tier cable one for play every time.

Wire in, full stop. An ethernet cable from your console or PC to the router cuts 10 to 30 ms off your ping and kills the jitter wifi adds, the single biggest thing any player can do. Clear the decks during a session by pausing big downloads and getting the 4K stream off the line. If the ping is still high on a wired connection, the line is the ceiling and the only real fix is a better one. The symmetric altnet networks are built for exactly this, Hyperoptic and YouFibre chief among them, and the test above shows the low-latency deals at your address. The detail lives in what a good ping is, and you can isolate latency on its own with the ping test.