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Why ping is not reporting as per the math?

By January 4, 2018 October 4th, 2018 No Comments

Most of the IT’ites test connectivity using ping tool, without a doubt it is the favourite tool among to many of us.
We also know that in this world things won’t work exactly the way theory says 🙂

By Theory, Light travels a near speed of 300,000 km/s in vacuum (not exactly that figure, but very close to), though It gets bit slower with fibre optics, and since electricity travel close to the speed of light. Let’s safely assume that ping travels with the speed of light.

So to cover a distance between two places on this globe, by choosing shortest route the maximum would be not more than 20,000 km (that is halfway around globe).
As the packet that goes would have to have an acknowledgement, formally round trip time/ RTT for ping packet it would be approximate 40,000 km travel.

If we do the match and in a perfect world it can be around 130 ms for a packet to complete a round trip between two maximum distance points on the globe.

So why does ping report higher latency / Factors impacting RTT

  • Because it is not always a perfect straight line, and the packet would have to travel through detours. Hopping among many routers to reach the destination.
  • The connectivity equipment would also slow down the packet. The more the routers, firewalls the packet to hop the more time it takes to reach.
  • Most importantly, The Traffic and congestion that exists over the links.
  • And it also depends on how busy is the responder to give a response.
How could we reduce the distance and delay of the packet travel?

  • Use WAN Optimization to cut the traffic down and to reduce the congestion. You can get better latency this way.
  • Based on what content/data you have, you could opt to go with Content Delivery Networks (CDN).

Hope this post helps.

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