Among the most common complaints about the state of an Internet connection —especially among the gaming public— is lag. If you have nodded when you hear this word, but you have never really understood the dimensions of its meaning, we are going to explain what this term means.
Generally we tend to look at other aspects related to our Internet connection when we do an Internet speed test, but you will see that there is a parameter measured in milliseconds that is also quite important.
Internet latency and ping
Commonly called lag, for its term in English, it is the delay from the sending of information from a source until it reaches its destination . A high latency or lag, produce a terrible experience at a communicative level, both in sending data and in the user or users who are using the Internet at the time it occurs.
Ping or latency are especially important in those situations where the immediacy with which we communicate with a server is crucial. Latency or lag is inevitable because all remote communication involves a certain delay in the arrival of data. However, there are measurements of a few milliseconds, ms for short, that do not affect the user at all.
A laggy Internet can be desperate.
Lag occurs in different consequences depending on the format in which it is presented . For example, in videos the image quality tends to worsen, your music may have a static sound. As we said before, the most classic or frequent level of complaints happens in online video games, seeing that there is a delay in your character carrying out your commands since you have carried out the necessary action for it.
For its part, ping (Packet Internet Groper or Internet Packet Tracker) is a command used to test the connection between two network nodes by sending packets to a remote server and returning a time measurement in ms or milliseconds to the user. This result acts as the way to measure the latency of a connection.
If you have a high ping, the quality of your internet connection will suffer and you will experience a delayed response time. For reference, significant latency is a ping rate of less than 130 milliseconds . 20ms is considered cool.
How to reduce lag
The presence of this excessive delay , which is what the term lag usually refers to (although delay is always going to be something), may be related to high latency in the network or because there is not enough processing power in the service. or client with whom the communication is established. It can be your computer or the Internet connection.
Once this is understood, there are several possible solutions. First of all, from the connection side, fiber optic networks have less latency than mobile or satellite networks. With fiber optics, data travels with more speed and stability than the internet connection via ADSL (copper cable line). With this technology, a more fluid and secure connection is obtained and the ping is reduced to almost a minimum .
A lag-free connection is crucial for online gaming.
From the point of view of your computer or connected device, if you have several programs and applications running at the same time, it is very likely that the ping will increase. So that it does not affect you and you can have a connection without problems, close all the programs that you are not using, especially those that consume a large part of the bandwidth.