Difference between these terms when testing internet speed

[Human Being]

Ping,latency and jitter.What does these three terms defines about internet speed?

 

[Eximo]

Ping and latency are related. Ping is a command line utility, provided with an IP address it will send test packets and time how long it takes to receive a response from the destination. This is outputted in milliseconds and is called latency.

Not sure what jitter is.

 

[jimmysmitty]

Ping is a tool used to test connectivity. You ping a server or website and it will send 4 packets to that server or website and wait for a response. It will tell you if there is any packet loss and the latency in milliseconds of how long it took to get a response back from the server.

Latency is a term to describe the time between input and output. It is used in a lot of areas. Online it is used to determine the time it takes to get a response from the server after you have sent a request. The lower this is the better. In games the lower the latency the more of an advantage you typically have as you will be receiving information faster.

Jitter is similar to latency except it is used to describe when there is a difference in time between packets. If you to a ping test you might get some (on a fast server) that come back in 8ms while others might come back in 10ms. The less jitter the better but it doesn't cause any sort of connection loss.

As to how they define internet speed? Ping doesn't at all as it is a tool you use in the Windows Command Prompt.

Latency does somewhat determine it but you can have a 150Mbps connection with a average latency of 30ms while others might have an average latency of 15ms as it all depends on the path you take from your PC to your central office then to the server you are trying to reach. Since jitter is the difference between packet speeds that is technically part of latency and that extra time between packets gets added to and averaged out over all the packets being sent to and from the server.

 

[Human Being]

Right now,via command line,I've pinged google.com and I get
0% loss (After sending 4 packets of each 32bytes)
Round-Trip Average =373ms
TTL = 52 (Don't know what really it is)

 

[jimmysmitty]

TTL means time-to-live. It is basically a feature that tells a router if a packet has been in the network for too long and if it should be discarded or not.

Another way to look at it is it counts the hops it takes to get to point B (google) from point A (you) and is used to determine if it is taking too long to get a response to throw the packet away and try again.

 

[Human Being]

Thanks Eximo and jimmysmitty I'm done now