ping?

I've had minor problems with my connection since a bunch of us were moved prior to the dratted olympics. I had a sound and decent connection until then (ADSL2+), but since had problems like pages not loading first time, emails not downloading immediately or not connecting to the server at first attempt, and sometimes images not loading. All intermittent.
I'm told there's no chance of being moved back to where I was before the olympics.

There's been some planned maintenance and also a fault affecting our phone code in the past week, causing two disconnections, and since then I've noticed that Speedtest reports the ping as 45 or 55 whereas it was always 25 before.
I always use speedtest just to check for consistency etc.

Was told today that as there was no more planned 'tinkering', to just unplug the router and then re-connect, and it did get the up speed back and a slightly improved down speed (Router:1095/8343), but I still get a ping of 45 or 55 using the same checkers as always. SNR D/U right after todays reconnection was 6.3/5.3, so better than the 14.2 up I had in the past 24 hours.
I see I've been put on interleaved instead of fast too.

How important is the ping to someone who doesn't use online gaming but just wants fast pageloads etc.

Anything really under a 100 is adequate and you won't really notice and major difference in webpage loading.

What is ping?

This measurement tells how long it takes a "packet" of data to travel from your computer to a server on the Internet and back. Whenever you experience delayed responses in Internet applications - this would be due to a higher than desired ping. Similar to packet loss, lower is better when it comes to ping. A result below 100 ms should be expected from any decent broadband connection.

Like Ben said, but:

In reply to a post by TrishaH:

I see I've been put on interleaved instead of fast too.

That could easily explain the increase in your ping times, and possibly the slight increase in speed you mentioned.

If your line is a bit "noisy" some data packets may get corrupted and will have to be re-sent, this reduces your effective download speed. Interleaving puts in extra error correction systems and greatly reduces the need for re-sending packets (as well as reducing the likelihood of dropped connections), but it does impose the penalty of increased ping times, usually by around 15-25mS.

A ping of around 50mS is nothing at all to worry about.

Thank you both.

I knew roughly what ping was, but not how much it could affect pageloads, email etc at that level.

Bill, the interleaving happened right after the first BT fault repair caused a disconnection and didn't affect the SNR which was pretty close to what it has been for some time.
The second one for planned maintenance a few days later reconnected with SNR up of 14.6, and almost half upload speed.
Still, whatever or however I got reconnected that first time I ended up with interleaving which happened the day after on 3rd.
On both occasions the ping is showing between 45 & 55 ..unusual for my connection, but as you both say it's not likely to cause noticeable problems, then I'll not worry about it.

I'm still not happy that pre-olympics it was a better connection where I was connected though! Seems there's nothing they can do about moving those people back
I'll see how it goes now. It's seemed pretty much OK tonight.
Unless there's a reason, I rarely lose connection.

What you describe broadly makes sense, but there are so many variables involved that it's impossible to be rigorous about it.

It's often said that comms isn't a science, it's a black art, and trying to get copper wires to carry signals several thousand times faster than they were intended to doesn't help

'Black art' seems appropriate!

I've learned a lot in the past year just reading here and understanding bits, which in turn helps me understand my connection a little better.
Understanding it all may as well be quantum mechanics (to me).

Tech dept at ISP said basically the same about the old system trying to perform the seemingly impossible!

Nice one Bill, forgot to mention about interleaving, haven't had to worry about it for such a long time!

Well I didn't have to 'see how it goes' for long - found it had lost sync shortly after 8am this morning.
The router showed the new connection to be 9349 down/1092 up - highest I've seen on the download speed.
The SNR was 3.2 down/5.9 up at around 11am, and it's now 2.1/5.9.

The pageloads haven't been any faster today though with some still hesitating, but apart from that no problems so far.
Not at all sure if it'll last, but Speedtest now gives me the 45 ping & just over 8mbs with the usual .92 up. (It had been 6.9 for some time).

By the way, I can't get the BT speedtester to complete - tried it a number of times in the past few days/evenings and it siezes up after doing the upload test, then after a while says there's a fault and it's busy!