Does anyone know what is wrong with our internet?

[Narnia]

I was playing Battlefront II on my pc tonight online and after a few seconds of playing I was booted from the game for having too high of a ping. I went to speedtest.net and it said my download speed was 2.77 mb/s and my ping was 166. We recently upgraded our internet speed to 6mb/s. I took the test again and my speed was 1.69mb/s with a ping of 188. I took the test yet another time and my speed was 0.46Mb/s with a ping of 195. I finally took the test a 4th time and it said my internet speed was .26 Mb/s with a ping of 223! Does anyone know what is going on? Is speedtest.net safe? (I tested my Internet speed a week ago after we upgraded our internet speed and it was at 6 Mb/s with a ping of 57ms. Should I contact my ISP? It is Frontier ever sense Verizon sold us out nono: bad Verizon) Does anyone have any other ideas?

PS what is ping anyways and why is it so important for video games?

 

[Maniacal]

Ping is the amount of time it takes in milliseconds (1/1000th of a second) for data to be sent from the server host to your computer and vice versa. The higher your ping the harder it can be to play as you will lag behind the server and other players with a low ping. It can depend on the game sometimes, I've been able to play the Battlegrounds 2 mod for HL2 with a ping of 250 and top the scoreboard, but generally you want a ping of 100 or lower for best results (anything under 150 should be perfectly fine unless you are extremely sensitive to it personally).

Some admins will set their servers to kick high-ping players automatically. I don't know about Battlefront II but most server browsers display the server's ping as a numerical value. Look for a server with a low ping and play on it.

No idea about the speedtest thing but I've never found it to be terribly reliable in regards to anything other than sppedtest's own servers.

6mb isn't a very fast connection (ISPs advertise in mega-bits, which is less than Mega-Bytes), but you should still be able to play.

I live in BC, Canada on the Pacific coast and I find that servers in the eastern USA or Texas have a ping of around 100-120 usually. If the ping is 200+ then the server is in the UK or somewhere else in Europe.

You also do not want to download anything while playing the game, or have anyone or anything using a chunk of your internet connection while gaming either as this increases your ping/lag.

 

[GoodGame]

In other words, if your ping is too high you should log in to another server, preferably one that is geographically closer to your home.