My ping is way too high, what can I do?

Well firstly, you have to understand that you don't 'have a ping'.. A ping is a measure of time it takes to receive a response from a given server after initiating a ping request.

So the ping time will therefore vary significantly vary between servers. If you ping your neighbour for example, it may take only 10ms to get a reponse since you are so close in proximity and the data does not have to travel far nor does it have to travel through many heavy traffic routers.

In contrast, if you were to ping a server in Australia, you may get a response time of 500 ms!

So your ping time means absolutely nothing without context.

If this is a sudden problem, you may want to contact your ISP to see if they can help resolve the issue. If for example ping requests to any given website are taking abnormally long compared to ping times you have achieved previously, this would indicate that there may be a problem on the ISP end.

When streaming video stutters, it is usually a problem with bandwidth and not necessarily ping times. You should check your bandwidth at speedtest.net to see if it approximately matches the expected bandwidth or connection 'speed' that your ISP is supposed to be providing you.

Lower than expected bandwidth could be due to:

- Other computers/devices on your network hogging up bandwidth

- ISP intentionally capping or shaping your bandwidth (some ISPs will do this if you start downloading too much for example)

- There is a connection problem between you and the service provider that may be unintentional. Perhaps one of the ISPs main equipment or backbone has failed for example, and traffic is being re-routed through alternative means with less available bandwidth.