Networking devices on the internet are usually smart enough to account for jitter and smooth out the rate of data packet transfer, so you won't notice any disruption to your broadband experience. If the rate of delay between those packets becomes irregular or increases then your jitter value will go up.

These packets usually move at a regular rate (think: frames per second) and are stitched back together on the destination computer into whatever they started off as - perhaps an image, email, video or voice call. Learn more: How to ping a computer or website Jitterĭata is transmitted across the internet as a series of packets - sort of like the individual frames of a celluloid film strip. Online gamers are especially keen to see low latency to ensure they experience fast, smooth game-play and can keep up with other players on fast broadband connections. Ping is sometimes referred to as latency, which in computer terms means the time (or delay) it takes for data to move from one device to another. A typical ping rate across the same city should be lower than 20ms, while between cities you'd expect to see ping values between 30-60ms, and between continents that figure can climb to 150-200ms. The Chorus Speed Test should automatically select a test server that is close to you, so you can expect a low ping rate. If that other computer is far away or the network is busy then it will take longer to receive a response and the ping value will be high. Ping is a basic yet effective tool for checking connections between two computers or devices on a network.Īs the name suggests, ping sends a signal out to another computer and measures in milliseconds how long it takes to receive a response (for the maritime experts out there, it's a similar principle to sonar!). Learn more: How to run a broadband speed test Ping So the more megabits per second you see in your speed test results the stronger your connection.ĭon't confuse megabits (Mb) with megabytes (MB)! Megabits are usually used to talk about the speed data travels, while megabytes refer to the size of a file or the storage capacity. That's because the things we like doing on the internet - like streaming movies, TV and music, and playing games - require lots of information to move quickly from the internet to our computer, device or TV. The faster you can download and upload data, the more enjoyable your internet experience will be. When we talk about the speed at which data moves across the internet we refer to megabits per second (1,000,000 bits per second) and more recently gigabits per second (1,000,000,000 bits per second). The basic unit of measurement for a piece of computer data is the bit, which can be either 0 or 1.

What is a fast download speed