Ping is an extremely popular topic on gaming forums, especially in troubleshooting threads where everyone attempts to find news ways to lower ping. Since we’ve already heard that term getting thrown around a lot, we’ve decided to shift our focus to it and give it our undivided attention for a while. In other words, we’ll debunk the 0 ping myth once and for all, whether it turns out to be a hoax or a viable scenario. But first, we need a bit of basic understanding of what ping is and how it works.
What is ping?
Latency is the time data needs to travel from your computer to any remote device and the other way around. We use ping to measure that latency’s value. That’s precisely why we try to avoid high ping, especially in games, because higher ping is equivalent to higher latency. The longer it takes for data to travel throughout your connection, the later you’ll get to experience it. That’s why you experience high ping while playing games in other regions. For instance, when playing a video game, high ping may translate into stuttery movement, unresponsive menus, and a general game slowdown. As ping is expressed in milliseconds, you can easily see how long it takes data to travel through your connection.
How does ping work?
The initial device (your PC) sends a small data packet to a remote server If the host is up, the data packet (hopefully) reaches its destination The host server generates a response and sends a data packet back to you
That’s basically how ping works. We’re not going to overburden you with unnecessarily complicated terms. It’s worth mentioning that if data packets don’t arrive at their destination, we call it packet loss. So, in essence, ping can help you assess how fast a small data packet can travel to your destination of choice, and then back to you. Ping is also a useful tool to see if any host is up. For instance, firing up a CMD instance on your Windows 10 PC and typing ping x.x.x.x where x.x.x.x is any host address will tell you whether it’s up or down. Furthermore, you’ll also see how fast data travels between the two endpoints (i.e. you and the host).
Is 0 ping possible?
Yes, and no, depending who you ask. As we’ve previously explained, ping can be used to measure how fast data travels between various devices. However, this speed highly depends on a wide variety of factors, including but not limited to distance, hardware quality, connection capacity, not to mention additional hardware between you and the server (cables, modems, routers). Therefore, it’s not possible to achieve 0 ping between you and a remote server. As data takes time to travel, any additional distance between your PC and the game server would further add milliseconds to the ping value. Having 0 ping would mean that the server would already receive the data packets before your PC could even send it, which is a bit paradoxical, come to think of it. On the other hand, you may achieve 0 ping if you’re both the pinger and the host, which is kind of useless (unless you’re hosting a game). You can try it out by using the ping localhost command in a CMD. You’ll most definitely receive ping values of <1ms (which we count as 0 ms).
Final thoughts on achieving 0 ping
All things considered, while it’s possible to achieve 0 ping by playing both roles (pinger and pingee), it’s not exactly useful. Data takes time to travel, and not even fiber network can bend the laws of physics to achieve 0 ping. However, you can lower your ping as close to zero as possible by resorting to a wide variety of solutions. For example, you can use a VPN to improve ping, speed up your Internet connection by using custom DNS servers like Google Public DNS, and perform regular network maintenance.
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