Test your Ping Time

A ping test is a good way of testing the suitability of your internet connection for VoIP.  A ping test sends a small packet of data to a remote server, which then sends it straight back.  The ping time is the time is the time for the round trip of that packet of data, known as the latency.

To carry out a ping test on a Windows 10 PC

1. Open a “command prompt” window either from the Windows System -> Command prompt icon from the Start menu, or by typing ‘Command’ into the search bar and choosing the ‘Command prompt’

     or     

2. This will open a command window.  At the prompt, type ping -t www.google.com  and press return.   You will see one line appear per second as each ping test is performed.

After leaving the ping to run for a few minutes, prest CTRL and C at the came time.  This will stop the ping and bring up some statistics.

A good internet connection should:

1. Have a latency (ping time) ideally of less than 20-30ms (millseconds), but as long as this is stable, it can usually be as high as 100ms without a delay that would be noticeable in conversation.
2. Have low variability (jitter).  The stability of the ping, called jitter.  We would hope to see jitter of less than 20-30ms.  Ie the difference between the longest and shortest ping time in a test
3. No Packet loss

Examples of some results are shown below.  If you find that your ping test result is not ideal, contact support@prodosec.com.  We are able to put in place some monitoring that will track the ping time on a long term basis and suggest some solutions

A Good Ping Result

This is a good ping result.  The ping is stable between 9 and 26 ms (milliseconds).  A test over a longer period may be useful, but this would appear to be very good for VoIP with a ping time under 30ms, little variation and no packet loss

A marginal Ping Result

Here we can see that the ping time varies between 63ms and 126ms.  The latency is longer than we would like to see, and there is a large variation.  We would recommend more testing

A Poor Ping Test Result

The result below has a good ping time, but has packet loss of 16%.  This will definitely cause audio issues and possibly dropped calls.  More investigation is required.  Try a reboot of your modem and router.  if this does not work, look to see if one rogue device is using all of your bandwidth