ping
ping
I only checked my home Wi-Fi speed on speedtest.net, which reported a ping of 2 ms and an internet speed of about 58 Mbps. That’s quite fast for ping—usually you’d expect higher latency. The low ping suggests good connectivity, but whether it’s bad depends on your needs. If you’re streaming or playing online, 2 ms is excellent. For general use, it’s fine, though consistency matters.
Ping should remain minimal. It represents the delay between your device and the remote server. Greater latency leads to delayed responses. This is critical in competitive online gaming, where even small differences can determine outcomes.
Ping is the tool that transmits ICMP messages between devices and evaluates the delay for a packet's journey. Measuring this time helps assess network latency.
I'll double down on yours and say that both scenarios you gave are the same situation, attempting to be pedantic is already annoying but it's even more useless when your information is off-base. The resultant output you get from a ping response is the length of time from sending an ICMP echo request, and receiving the ICMP echo reply, which takes both ingress and egress legs into account. You will never see the same packet in a round trip unless you have a routing loop. There are factors that can make ping not necessarily representative of the data path (such as pinging a busy router where latency increases as the packet is delayed on the control plane, but doesn't impact data plane latency), but for most general usage it's a reliable baseline.