In reply to a post by Pipexer:

You are misunderstanding/overthinking it.

As MrSaffron has said, the speedtest doesn't use ICMP to measure latency. Doing a ping in command prompt is the most accurate method of determining the actual path of your connection to the thinkbroadband servers - and even that is only relevant as far as from you to TBB (however it does of course give you an indication of what your baseline is going to be).

ping only uses a probable path that tcp might use,
and just as accurate is the tbb bqm which does ping from the far end.

Edited by ggremlin (Sun 14-Jan-18 22:11:42)

Latency of HTTP packets is actually pretty important, since web pages do lots of grabbing of smaller elements so latency as measured in the speed test is relevant, remember a webpage is just one URL but may contain 100 elements that need fetching.

The single figure reported is measured when the test was otherwise idle, there are additional measurements done during the download and upload phase to assess buffer bloat. The analysis button in the test shows the actual measurements in a graph.

I think the answer to the question must be that ping and latency are measuring different things. In terms of telephone technology a ping is the time it takes for the called phone to start ringing, not the time taken to answer it so that's pretty meaningless unless it's obviously very high. Perhaps someone knows what the TBB latency time actually measures?

What users are interested in is how long it takes to see a web page on screen. As the browser has to assemble most pages from numerous elements usually fetched from different servers that can be quite long. Some of those elements will be cached on intermediate servers along the path and others, such as your bank account, will not. Almost all elements will require a DNS lookup before they can be accessed so it's important to use a fast DNS server - again the ping time is not necessarily an indicator of time taken to provide data, though a short ping time will help.

It's useful to use traceroute to find how many hops to various destinations as a large number could indicate problems (congestion?) with your ISP's servers or others along the route. Wildly varying ping times are also an indication of problems.

>Perhaps someone knows what the TBB latency time actually measures?

How often do I need to repeat myself - round trip time for a small HTTP TCP packet.

Many thanks to all for your thoughts.

I think I was trying to be over-analytical.

Internet connections and usage are varied and complex. Like other measurements, perhaps ping and latency are best used subjectively, to make general comparisons over time and to give a pointer to a problem if things deteriorate.

In reply to a post by Thinker27:

Many thanks to all for your thoughts.

I think I was trying to be over-analytical.

Internet connections and usage are varied and complex. Like other measurements, perhaps ping and latency are best used subjectively, to make general comparisons over time and to give a pointer to a problem if things deteriorate.

yea, you need to consider transmission/re-transmission errors etc., as well as the load/performance of the remote servers
ping/latency are just two of the tools in the box