What is latency and why can the Internet be slow even with many megabits?
Published on 2026-10-20 by frfrand
Latencia explicada: milisegundos, ping, RTT, jitter, pérdida de paquetes, ancho de banda y consejos para medir una conexión.
Latency is the time it takes for information to travel between two points on a network. It is usually measured in milliseconds and helps explain why a connection can feel slow even if it has an excellent download speed.
You can hire hundreds of megabits per second and still notice lag in video games, calls, or remote applications. Bandwidth and latency do not describe exactly the same thing.
The highway example
Imagine a very wide highway between two cities. It can allow many trucks to circulate at the same time: that is similar to bandwidth.
But if the cities are very far apart, the first truck will still take time to arrive. That travel time is similar to latency.
Having more lanes does not necessarily shorten the distance traveled. On the Internet something similar happens: more transfer capacity does not automatically imply less delay to start receiving a response.
What is ping?
ping is a tool that usually uses ICMP messages to check if a device responds and measure round-trip times.
That round-trip time is called RTT, for round-trip time. It includes the journey of the request and its response, plus other delays.
If a test indicates 80 ms, it does not mean that each packet takes exactly 40 ms in one direction. Routes and conditions can be asymmetric.
Additionally, some servers block or limit ICMP, so a ping without a response does not automatically prove that the site is down.
What is jitter?
It is the variation in packet arrival times or latency. A connection with stable delays may perform better on a call than another where the time changes abruptly.
For example, having measurements of 35, 38, and 34 ms is usually different from measuring 15, 170, and 25 ms, even though a simple average may not capture the real experience well.
In audio and video games, large variations can cause cuts, irregular movements, or delays.
And packet loss?
It occurs when sent information does not arrive correctly at its destination. Depending on the protocol and application, it may be necessary to retransmit it or simply continue with newer data.
It is not advisable to confuse loss with latency: they can appear together, but they describe different problems.
A very loaded connection, an unstable wireless link, or a saturated network device can contribute to delays and losses.
Does distance matter?
Yes. Information travels at finite speeds and crosses several links, routers, and networks. A request to a server on another continent normally has a greater minimum physical delay than one to a nearby server.
A CDN can help bring certain resources closer, but it cannot eliminate the latency of an operation that needs to query a database located far away.
That's why the region where you host an application matters when your audience is concentrated in one location.
How to better measure a website?
Don't limit yourself to ping. Also check server response time, page size, how much the browser blocks rendering, and real user experience.
Route diagnostic tools can help investigate where delays occur, but each hop may treat tests differently. Do not interpret a single measurement as absolute proof that a certain router "is slow."
How is latency reduced?
Choose infrastructure close to the main audience when viable, avoid unnecessary queries, reuse connections, optimize the application, and consider a CDN for static files.
Within an office, using a wired connection or improving wireless coverage can help in certain cases. But no local optimization changes the physical distance between continents.
And in ArduMaker?
When deploying an application on an ArduMaker VPS, the server region and network architecture influence the visitor experience. It is advisable to measure latency from where real users are, not only from the developer's computer.
In summary: bandwidth indicates capacity, latency indicates travel time, and jitter indicates variation. They are three distinct measures that are best interpreted together.
Sources: Latency according to Cloudflare · What is a CDN.