What is a good ping? Is 20, 40, 60 or 100 ms good?
Yes, 40 ms is a good ping. For most uses, under 50 ms is good and under 20 ms is excellent. From 50 to 80 ms is fine for streaming, browsing and calls, and playable for games. Above 80 ms you may notice lag in fast-paced games.
What ping is
Ping is the time, in milliseconds (ms), that a small message takes to travel from your device to a server and back. It is also called latency, ping rate, ping speed or round-trip time. It says nothing about how much data you can move per second. It only says how long each trip takes.
Is my ping good? Look up your number
| Your ping | Verdict | What to expect |
|---|---|---|
| 1 to 19 ms | Excellent | Instant. A result of 1 ms is rare on the open internet and usually means a very close server. |
| 20 to 30 ms | Good | Fine for everything, including fast online games. |
| 40 ms | Good | Fine for everything, including fast online games. |
| 50 ms | Good | The top of the good range. Fast games are still comfortable. |
| 60 to 65 ms | Playable | Fine for streaming and calls. Fast games show a little lag. |
| 80 ms | Playable | The last step before lag becomes clear in fast games. |
| 100 ms | Noticeable | Fast games feel behind. Calls may have small pauses. |
| 150 ms | Noticeable | At the edge of poor for live use. |
| 200 ms or more | Poor | Clear delay in calls and games. |
| 1,000 to 2,000 ms | Very poor | Calls and games break up. Check Wi-Fi, a VPN and what else is using the line, then contact your provider if it stays. |
Your number sits between two rows? Use the nearest one. These are rule-of-thumb ranges, not an official standard, and they match the SpeedUp verdicts. For games in particular, see what ping is good for gaming.
Ping ranges
| Ping | Rating | What it feels like |
|---|---|---|
| Under 20 ms | Excellent | Instant. Nothing you do online is held back by delay. |
| 20 to 50 ms | Good | Fine for everything, including fast online games. |
| 50 to 80 ms | Playable | Fine for streaming, browsing and calls. Fast games show some lag. |
| 80 to 150 ms | Noticeable | Fast games feel behind. Calls may have small pauses between speakers. |
| Over 150 ms | Poor | Clear delay in calls and hard to play fast games. |
Turn-based games and streaming hardly depend on ping at all.
What makes ping higher
- Distance. Signals take time to travel. As a rough guide, each 100 km to the server adds about 1 ms of round trip in the best case. Cloudflare reports that users about 100 miles from a data centre typically see 5 to 10 ms, and users about 2,200 miles away see closer to 40 to 50 ms.
- Wi-Fi. A weak signal or a crowded channel adds delay, and retries make it vary. A cable is usually lower and steadier.
- Connection type. Fibre is usually lowest. Cable and DSL are often a little higher, and mobile and satellite connections are usually higher still.
- A busy line. When your connection is full, the router queues messages. That extra delay is called bufferbloat.
- A VPN or relay. Your traffic takes a longer path.
Idle ping and ping under load
SpeedUp measures both. Idle ping is the delay when nothing else is happening. Ping under load is the delay while the connection is busy downloading. The gap between them is the bufferbloat, and it often explains lag that a simple ping test misses.
How to lower your ping
- Use a cable instead of Wi-Fi, or move closer to the router.
- Pause downloads, backups and streams on other devices.
- Turn off any VPN you do not need.
- If your ping under load is much higher than idle, follow the bufferbloat fixes.
- Restart the router if it has been running for weeks.
- On mobile data, move to where the signal is stronger.
Why your ping here can differ from your in-game ping
SpeedUp pings the nearest Cloudflare server, not your game server or video call server. It shows how good your own connection is. A game on a server far away will show a higher number in its own ping display.