Ping levels

bloodhunter · 29 Dec 2010 at 18:18

Can long ethernet cables cause high ping levels.
With a standard short cable i get about 12ms on pingtest.net but if i connect to a long (approx 40ft) ethernet cable in a different floor in our home i get Ping levels of about 45ms.

[J.D.C] · 29 Dec 2010 at 18:20

40ft shouldn't be a problem.

100ft+ and theoretically, you might have an issue.

Obviously might be worth testing another cable though just in-case.

SupermotoMX · 29 Dec 2010 at 18:22

the ping to your router?

i have a 40ft cat5 cable from my pc to my router and my ping to it is still 0ms. might want to make sure its not running alongside any power cables

[J.D.C] · 29 Dec 2010 at 18:22

I assume he's talking about ping tests. Online-Gaming etc.

Not just pinging from cmd.

Yamahahahahaha · 29 Dec 2010 at 19:10

Ethernet moves at about 2/3rds the speed of light over copper.
The majority of latency comes from nodes themselves.

LiamJ · 29 Dec 2010 at 19:17

[J.D.C];18100483 said:
I assume he's talking about ping tests. Online-Gaming etc.

Not just pinging from cmd.

The point he was making is that the cable should have very little effect on his ping from the exchange to his computer.

owl101 · 29 Dec 2010 at 20:08

40ft of cable is still negligible, only when you are pushing at around 360 feet will you start bumping into troubles since the resistance of a cable that long will drop the voltages to levels that will be treated as erroneous packets or noise by the receiving device. Long cables will cause packet loss not ping delays.

However, poor quality, poorly shielded or damaged cables can cause latency and in the case of a damaged cable you may see packet loss as well. I would suggest running the following command in your command prompt:
netstat -e
This would show you if there are any issues that your system's NIC is seeing and help you to rule out, in part, local problems.

Also you might want to download WinMTR and run a ping test to something like www.google.com for a couple of thousand packets. This will show you any link issues that may be prevalent from your system to your router, through your ISP, to your nearest google server. WinMTR can be downloaded from: http://winmtr.net/

I'm happy to help if you need help breaking the various results down into possible areas of contention and what the results mean.

HangTime · 29 Dec 2010 at 20:45

I use a 20m (over 60ft) cable with no problems at all:

Ping statistics for 192.168.0.1:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 0ms, Maximum = 1ms, Average = 0ms

Yes obviously a shorter cable would be marginally better, but it is insignificant relative to other causes of high latency.

An increase of 33ms just by using a different ethernet cable is just plain wrong - it could be a faulty cable, also if it's not properly shielded it could be getting interference from powerlines possibly.