All these terms are quite related but I couldn't understand when to use which. I often hear that some networks have low bandwidth and high ping rate for online gaming. I thought they might be inversely proportional but that's not the case. When someone introduces "high ping and low ping" it becomes more confusing. What are they?
Bandwidth – Difference Among Bandwidth, Ping, Ping Rate, and Latency
bandwidthlatencyping
Best Answer
Ping is a utility to test network connectivity. It uses ICMP echo request/reply to do this. The originating host sends an ICMP echo request, and the receiving host sends an ICMP echo reply. There are several messages which may be returned:
Most ping programs run the ping several times, and they return a round-trip ICMP network latency. The Ping program usually gives you the number of packets sent, received, lost, and the loss percent, along with the lowest, highest, and average ping latency. Unfortunately, this is often confused with a real network latency, but the two may not be related on a network with multiple hops, especially the Internet where ICMP is often delayed or rerouted, unlike other traffic. ICMP is not the protocol used for most data communications, and the latency returned by ping may not reflect any other application latency.
Bandwidth is only indirectly related to latency. The bandwidth on an unloaded network has nothing at all to do with the latency. The real network latency is due mostly to network congestion, and bandwidth plays the largest part in that for busy networks. Latency reflect the aggregation of distance latency, and the latency added by network devices in the path. The largest component of the latency is by the network devices, due to congestion on the network, and a busy connection causes congestion.