You may be paying good money for your internet service, but the quality may fall short of your expectations. And if you play online games like me on a slow internet connection, you’ve probably noticed high ping.
High ping indicates network latency or delay, which is typically a bad sign for your internet experience. Even if you upgrade your equipment or internet connection, you may still experience high ping values.
Why Is My Ping So High?
There is no ‘one’ answer to high ping. A high ping could indicate an issue with the game server.
In 2019, the popularity of the mobile game PUBG was steadily rising. To tackle the massive growth of players, the company put up a new update 5.1 that centralized about 60 percent of North America server game sessions to just one location in Dallas, Texas.
Naturally, users started experiencing high ping spikes when playing the game. The team soon had to roll out another fix to handle the situation before losing any users to competitors.
It could also be an issue of your ISP or your server’s location. Or the issue may lie with your own gaming device. As you see, there are several possible explanations for why your ping is so high.
Let’s take a look at each one and see where you fit in.
Quality of Internet Service Provider(ISP)
Your ISP isn’t delivering the internet speed that they promised. It could be an oversight on their part or they may be knowingly throttling your bandwidth. A good ISP should always keep their customers as first priority and deliver the finest quality network.
A bad ISP may be using poor infrastructure or hasn’t even set up proper cabling to your home. As a result of this, you will experience bad connectivity and high ping.
Internet Speeds
Your internet speed itself may be slow. If you are getting lesser upload and download speeds, the ping response time is also delayed. Your internet may suffer during peak hours when the load is largest.
Or, if your ISP follows Fair Usage Policy then they can legally throttle your bandwidth. Other times, it could be an interference issue between your device and router.
Wireless Connections
Wireless connections rely on radio wave signals to send data to and from your device. Because they suffer packet loss over the air, radio waves aren’t reliable. Also, two signals can interfere with each other and cause a delay in signal transmission. Higher pings are directly noticed as a result of this delay.
Distance From Router To The Device
If the router isn’t within the same space as the device, you will notice ping delays. Walls reduce connectivity and your device connection cannot get to the router. Thus you will see an increase in response time.
Distance From Server
If the server is geographically located away from you, then pinging it gives you a higher value. For example, you may be located in the United States and are trying to reach a UK server. Then the data needs to travel across the ocean to exchange information. The closer you are to the server, the less ping you will get.
A High Number Of Connected Devices
If your router is serving way too many devices at a time, your ping may suffer. An average router cannot handle a high volume of traffic at the same time. All devices connected to the same router use up your bandwidth together. The router may even crash or freeze if you overload it with lots of network devices.
Background Network Services
Your device(s) may be running background network services. This could be in the form of
Check your devices to see if any of the above services are running. If yes, then these services are using up the network traffic and causing higher ping.
VPN Services
If you are subscribed to VPN services, you are well aware of their usefulness. It may be possible that you left your VPN account connected to the service. If that is the case then it is normal to see a higher ping when trying to connect to other servers. When connected, the only server with decent ping is the VPN server itself.
How Can I Lower My Ping?
Use the following steps to lower your ping on laptop and desktop PC.
- Use ethernet cable instead of WiFi.
- Reboot your router.
- Move closer to the router.
- Pause software updates.
- Kill unwanted background tasks.
- Check internet bandwidth usage.
- Update Graphics Drivers.
- Check the number of connected devices.
- Flush DNS cache.
- Turn off downloads from other PCs.
- Update Network Drivers.
- Do an antivirus scan.
- Disable VPN services.
- Contact Internet Service Provider.
- Change Router.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why Is My Ping So High But The Internet Is Good On Mobile?
A good internet connection on the phone doesn’t mean a good ping. If your speed is decent, you can browse on the phone without any noticeable difference. But your connection may not be delivering data with the greatest efficiency.
Ping is a sign of how efficient the network is. With high internet speeds, you can retransmit lost packets over and over again. So the phone won’t notice any lag in connection. The only way to identify high ping on phones is to buffer a video or play online games.
Here’s a comprehensive guide on how to fix high ping in League of legends.
Why Is My Ping So High All The Time?
If your ping is high all the time, it could be due to the following reasons.
Why Is My Ping High In The Morning Or At Night?
If you get high pings at a consistent time it could be a routine network issue. Check the number of devices connected in the morning or at night. Other devices are likely hogging the network at these times. A large number of devices keeps your router busy and increases ping responses. Also, check your devices if they are performing a routine cloud backup at those times.
If the number of devices on your end is the same throughout the day, it could be a sign that your ISP is bandwidth throttling during peak hours to normalize the internet experience of all non-dedicated customers.
Some, if not all, ISPs have dedicated subscriptions where they guarantee the advertised internet speed at all times, and only then, is bandwidth throttling eliminated. The second reason could be overloaded servers during peak gaming hours like evenings and nights compared to early mornings and during the day.
Why Is My Ping High All Of A Sudden?
If you see your ping suddenly going high, try the following steps.
- Do a speed test to check your internet connection.
- Check if somebody is using the TV for streaming content.
- Check if there are any recently connected devices in your router.
- Check if your device started downloading a software update.
- Check if your anti-virus started doing a full PC scan.
- Check if the destination server is up using this tool.
Why Is My Ping High On Wired Connection/With Ethernet?
If you see high ping on ethernet, it could be one of the following reasons.
Why Is My Ping And Jitter So High?
Your ping and jitter may be high due to the following reasons
How To Lower Ping On Netflix?
To lower ping on Netflix, try the following steps.
- Stream Netflix over wired connections. If you are using a Smart TV or PC, use ethernet over wireless when watching Netflix.
- For wireless, move your device closer to the router
- Configure QoS feature in the router for your devices
- Clear your browser cache or app background data and cache
- For Netflix, reduce video quality settings to consume less bandwidth on limited connection.
- Update all apps to the latest stable versions
- Close any unnecessary background processes
- Turn off VPN service.
- Upgrade your hardware
- Gaming PC or gaming laptops
- Powerful routers
- Newer ps4 models