What's an 'acceptable' ping time?

[ainwood]

My dial-up is ridiculously slow in peak times. My ISP says is not their fault -> there server is never more than 65% busy. They have suggested that I send them a ping or a trace report.

Does anyone know a good utility for this? I got one called 'visual route' which looks OK....

I guess the important things I need are the error rate and the ping response times. But what is a 'normal' ping response time? (at the moment I'm getting anywhere from about 100 to about 1000 ms / node. I woudl have thought that 100 ms was about right (dial-up, remember!)

 

[Chieftess]

For dialup - 250 to 300 ping is good. Go into Windows, and type "tracert [IP address]" (Without the brackets).

EDIT: Just did a tracert on your IP. The ping shot up to 200 when it hit *.AKL1.gblx.net (3 hops before you). And I have a cable modem.

 

[ainwood]

Ahh, thanks!

I got a program called visual route, which does the job. I'm bascially getting 800 ms as an average. The strange thing is that the system seems to freeze half-way through pages / downloads. A refresh kick-starts it again, but whilst I can 'continue' a download, that's a bit more difficult for loading a webpage :ack