Work out ping to server estimate instantly with clear inputs, formula shown and shareable results.
Light travels about 200,000 km per second in fibre, so the one way delay is the routed path length over that speed, doubled for the round trip plus roughly half a millisecond per hop. Physics sets a hard floor: no amount of bandwidth can get a London to Sydney ping below about 160 ms, which is why server location beats connection speed for competitive play.
Propagation delay
one way ms = distance x routing factor / 200,000 km/s x 1000
Round trip
ping = 2 x one way delay + hops x 0.5 ms
one way ms = distance x routing factor / 200,000 km/s x 1000. Light travels about 200,000 km per second in fibre, so the one way delay is the routed path length over that speed, doubled for the round trip plus roughly half a millisecond per hop.
Physics sets a hard floor: no amount of bandwidth can get a London to Sydney ping below about 160 ms, which is why server location beats connection speed for competitive play.
Enter distance to the server, routing detour factor, network hops. The defaults shown are a realistic worked example — swap in your own figures to get a result you can use.