Ping, latency and jitter — explained with a pizza delivery
Three words that sound technical but describe something you already understand. Here is what each one means, what good looks like, and which one is ruining your video calls.
Imagine ordering a pizza.
- Bandwidth (your download speed) is how many pizzas the shop can deliver per hour.
- Latency is how long one pizza takes to reach your door after you order.
- Jitter is how much that delivery time varies from one order to the next.
You can have a shop that delivers a hundred pizzas an hour (huge bandwidth) and still wait forty-five minutes for yours (high latency). And if one night it is twenty minutes and the next it is an hour, that is jitter — and it makes planning dinner impossible.
Ping vs latency: is there a difference?
Not really. Latency is the general word for delay. Ping is the name of the tool (and the measurement) used to check it: send a tiny message, wait for the reply, time the round trip. When a speed test says "Ping: 24 ms", it means a round trip to the server and back took 24 thousandths of a second.
On Speedtesty we show two latency numbers because they answer different questions:
- Ping is measured when your connection is idle — its best-case reaction time.
- Latency under load is measured while the line is busy downloading or uploading — its reaction time when your family is streaming. That gap matters enormously.
What's a good ping?
| Ping | How it feels |
|---|---|
| Under 20 ms | Instant. Web pages snap open, games feel direct. |
| 20–50 ms | Very good. Competitive gaming is fine. |
| 50–100 ms | Fine for video, slightly floaty for fast games. |
| 100–200 ms | Noticeable delay in calls; you talk over each other. |
| 200 ms+ | Typical of satellite links. Frustrating for anything interactive. |
Physics sets a floor: light in fibre travels about 200 km per millisecond, so a server 1,000 km away cannot answer in less than 10 ms round trip. That is why Speedtesty uses the Cloudflare data centre nearest to you — the number you see reflects your connection, not geography.
What's a good jitter?
Jitter is the average change between consecutive ping measurements. For voice and video, steadiness beats speed: apps buffer a little audio to absorb jitter, and when jitter exceeds that buffer you hear robotic voices, dropped syllables and frozen frames.
- Under 5 ms — excellent.
- 5–15 ms — good; calls are clear.
- 15–30 ms — occasional glitches.
- Over 30 ms — calls will stutter. Look at your Wi-Fi first.
What causes high ping and jitter?
- Wi-Fi. Walls, distance, microwaves and your neighbours' networks all add random delay. A cable removes almost all of it.
- Congestion. A router with a full queue holds your packets while it drains bigger ones — the bufferbloat problem.
- Distance. Servers on other continents are slow because of geography, not because your line is bad.
- Mobile and satellite links. Both add tens of milliseconds by design.
The short version
Bandwidth is capacity. Ping is reaction time. Jitter is consistency. For streaming you want bandwidth; for gaming you want low ping; for calls you want low jitter. The test shows all three — and which one, if any, needs fixing.
See your own numbers
Run the test — it takes about 20 seconds and needs no account.