Quote from H2O:
You can also do a tracert (just use the word "tracert" in stead of "ping") This will show you the route and the servers (hops)
If there's a severe deley, you can see where it occurs.
Wrong, a sinple tracert will not show you were a delay is, unless you know the specific configurations of each server. it is perfectly normal to see times of 200ms in the midle of a tracert while the last hop in 40ms. All it generally will mean is that echo requests have a lower priority on the individual server. It is not a problem whatsoever. Think about it, if you keep doing a tracert (really its a traceroute, tracert is just a dos program.) over and over to yahoo.com you'll likely keep on seeing 200ms somewere in the middle but the end result yahoo.com is 40ms. its passing through all of those servers and only taking 40ms, but if you ping them individualy like a traceroute does, it will have a lower priority therefor might have a higer time.
Quote from H2O:Ping time has to do more with the length of the path you're routed to the destination over as opposed to the speed of your last mile connection.
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i'm not sure exactly what your saying, but if you are saying distance is a big factor, your not copletely correct. the actualy distance of the cabling has a very insignificant impact on latency, it is the servers (ie hops) that cause latency. (ping times are a measurement of latency, in a laymans sense.)
Quote from H2O:Whether you're on a 56K dialup or a 2MB cable link will have little impact on the result - it's the # of hops and the length of the overall round trip virtual circuit.
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actually being on dialup will make a significant difference even with all other things being equal. The analog to digital conversion is a decent factor, among intereference on pots (plain old telephone system) that causes problems with analog signals. Cable and DSL are digital from the computer which is much more resiliant from noise.
Quote from H2O:It's better to test your internet speed and capacity than ping times[/B]
That depends on what you want to do. If your downloading huge files bandwidth is more importannt, but if your doing nothing more than trading and only care about executions speeds, the pinng times are really all that matter. you can't just come on here and say one is better than the other, it depends on what you are doing.