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How do I get measure/compare average latency?

  • 04-04-2005 9:15pm
    #1
    zod
    Closed Accounts Posts: 2,025 ✭✭✭


    I'm with a wireless BB provider, and I feel that the experience is slow, though I can sometime get good download speeds. For gaming it's unusable.

    How do I get my average latency in a way thats fair to my ISP - just ping a few well known servers - but what do I compare against - is there a table somewhere for Ireland?


    Thanks in advance :o

    For those who might find the following usefull :-

    Q: Latency versus Bandwidth - What is it?
    A: One of the most commonly misunderstood concepts in networking is speed and capacity. Most people believe that capacity and speed are the same thing. For example, it's common to hear "How fast is your connection?" Invariably, the answer will be "640K", "1.5M" or something similar. These answers are actually referring to the bandwidth or capacity of the service, not speed.

    Speed (latency) and capacity (bandwidth) are two very separate things. The combination of latency and bandwidth gives users the perception of how quickly a webpage loads or a file is transferred. It doesn't help that broadband providers keep saying "get high speed access" when they probably should be saying "get high capacity access". Notice the term "Broadband" - it refers to how wide the pipe is, not how fast.

    Latency is normally expressed in milliseconds. One of the most common methods to measure latency is the utility ping. A small packet of data, typically 32 bytes, is sent to a host and the RTT (round-trip time, time it takes for the packet to leave the source host, travel to the destination host and return back to the source host) is measured.

    The following are typical latencies as reported by others of popular circuits type to the first hop. Please remember however that latency on the Internet is also effected by routing that an ISP may perform (ie, if your data packet has to travel further, latencies increase).


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