Today it’s no surprise to anyone that the Internet is an extremely important part of everyday life. Even the latest decisions of our government indicate that the authorities have realized the whole necessity of this means of communication, suggesting in the coming years to provide reliable connections to almost all settlements in the country.
One can only hope that all these plans will be implemented, since the lack of a normal communication channel has a bad effect on the infrastructure of remote settlements. Checking the quality of communication certainly worries every more or less experienced user, since the convenience and speed of almost all modern operating systems, which simply cannot fully function without the Internet, depend on this factor.
Someone uses paid third-party utilities to identify channel quality, but most experienced users prefer to use PING. What is it, by the way?
General concepts
Ping in a professional environment is called the response time of a remote computer or site. Simply put, this is the time during which the signal from your computer manages to go to the remote machine. The lower this indicator, the better the network performance.
Of course, ping is inversely proportional to the quality of the connection and the speed of your Internet connection. If the speed is low, and the quality of the channel itself leaves much to be desired, then its value can reach a figure of several hundred milliseconds (ms).
Important!
However, this definition is not entirely true for all methods of connecting to the Internet. You probably know about the bi-directional (asynchronous) satellite access channel to the World Wide Web. When using it, you can’t get a really small PING under any circumstances. What does it mean? It's all about the characteristics of this channel.
When using it, your computer will first send a request via the terrestrial communication channel (USB modem, Dial UP), and the incoming data stream will go through the satellite channel. Of course, even with fairly decent characteristics of terrestrial communications, a lot of time will pass before the signals are received and sent.
What depends on ping?
Of course, in the latter case, the data reception speed can be very decent, sometimes reaching hundreds of megabits per second, so there is clearly no reason to talk about poor communication. The problem is that the quality of the work of many popular services and services greatly depends on the value of ping. So, you can safely forget about online games in the event of a long ping. The same goes for real-time conferences.
The fact is that when communicating in real time, information to your interlocutor should come instantly, since the technology of preliminary buffering (for obvious reasons) cannot be used. So the Ping Test before the conference in real time should be carried out without fail.
If the ping is more or less normal, but still does not reach the optimum, it is easy to notice even when using the usual audio data transfer channel: the sound will “stutter”, “croak”, or even disappear periodically.
What factors affect ping?
The value of this value depends on several factors that must always be taken into account. In some cases, you can even reduce PING. What does it mean? The fact is that sometimes it is possible to eliminate the reasons due to which the response time is seriously increased.
So, the delay on the user computer (Ping Windows). First, the sound from the microphone goes to the sound card (built-in or discrete, there is not much difference), and from the webcam, the image passes through the USB port. The processing unit of your computer is responsible for processing most of the information. If the processor clock speed on your device is not too high, and the amount of RAM also does not cause much enthusiasm, serious problems with ping can be observed.
So, talking with a friend on Skype and using a low-power machine for this, try not to open a large number of dialog boxes at the same time. In addition, for this time you should refrain from watching Flash-videos, as it seriously overloads low-power processors on older computers.
Ping Server Provider
What should you know in this case? A huge role is played by the delay on the servers of the provider (Ping server) from which you buy access to the Internet. After all, it is the server of this company that connects the user computer to the Global Web. You should be aware that on the Internet , data transfer is carried out in small “snippets” of data, which are also called packets.
If the load on the provider's servers is extremely high, and the equipment used by it is very outdated, the processing of these packets is queued. In this case, you will not get a normal PING. What does this mean for the user? The same as in the case of satellite Internet: many interactive services can be safely forgotten.
Signal lines
From the provider, the signal passes to large trunk lines, along which it goes with great speed. As a rule, optical fiber is used, the speed of packets in which is equal to the speed of light, but less than the speed of light in vacuum. However, it should be remembered that numerous converters and amplifiers are encountered in the signal path, the system of which is extremely complex. Of course, all this also leads to an increase in the delay time. In this case, the Ping network is delayed.
Information Processing Server
A lot also depends on this object. So, modern Microsoft servers are capable of processing a huge amount of information per unit of time, which compares favorably with the equipment of a small company that does not have such capabilities. This is especially noticeable when transmitting streaming video, which has a very decent size and creates a heavy load on the server processor through which the transfer is made.
Having traveled such a long and difficult path, the signal is finally processed and sent back to the user's computer.
Attention! It is possible that he will go back a completely different way. Oddly enough, but sometimes the signal from Moscow is easier to throw through some Angola than using the very outdated trunk lines of local providers. In this case, it turns out to significantly reduce ping.
Ping Utility
As we already said in the very first part of the article, you can measure this indicator using the Ping utility built into the Windows system. Running it is very simple. First, left-click on the "Start" button, click on "All Programs", select "Standard" there. In the last folder there is a command line utility.
In its window, type the word ping, put a space, and then write the site address. Then you can press Enter. The utility will show the number of packets being sent, indicate the percentage of losses and measure the signal delay time.
As you can see, the Ping utility is a fairly informative and convenient tool.
The situation with ping here and in the world
In our country, until recently, the situation with signal delay was very sad. According to foreign and domestic experts, at the end of the 90s in the entire former CIS, the ping value was about 200-300 ms at best, while in Europe and the USA there have long been providers providing a delay of about 20-30 ms
Today Japan is confidently holding the palm. Having the ability even to ordinary users to provide the Internet with gigabit speed, local providers provide ping no more than 2-3 ms. Our situation has also improved: even the infamous Rostelecom provides Internet access with a delay of no more than 15-20 ms, which you could not wish for in previous years.
If we talk about neighboring countries, then there the Ping Test shows the signal quality at the level of 50-60 ms, which is quite an average indicator.
conclusions
Thus, delays in sending and receiving a signal have always been and will be, since they depend on many factors that weakly affect each other. It is in your power to optimize the hardware of your computer and choose the best provider (if possible).