Ping test from
28 locations worldwide.
Measure round-trip latency and detect packet loss to any host. Test ICMP reachability from 28 servers across 16 countries.
Measure round-trip latency and packet loss to any host from 28 global locations.
Note: All checks are public. To keep your checks private, create a free account.
Global Network Diagnostics
Run a check to see your service from around the world.
- Tested from 28 monitoring locations worldwide
- Results in seconds, not minutes
- Shareable result links for your team
- No account or signup required
What is a Ping Test?
A ping test uses the Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) to verify whether a host is reachable and to measure how long it takes for a packet to travel from a source to a destination and back. This round-trip journey is measured in milliseconds and referred to as Round-Trip Time (RTT).
When you run a ping test, your machine sends an ICMP Echo Request to the target host. If the host is reachable and not blocking ICMP traffic, it replies with an ICMP Echo Reply. The time between sending the request and receiving the reply is the latency you see reported.
Two other key values reported by a ping are Time to Live (TTL) and packet loss. TTL indicates how many network hops a packet can traverse before being discarded — it decreases by one at each router. Packet loss, expressed as a percentage, tells you how many requests went unanswered, which can signal network congestion, hardware issues, or deliberate ICMP filtering.
Ping is the most fundamental network diagnostic tool. When something is wrong with connectivity, ping is almost always the first tool used. Emercom runs pings simultaneously from 28 servers spread across 16 countries, giving you a global view of your host's reachability in a single test run.
Key Ping Metrics
| Metric | What it means |
|---|---|
RTT |
Round-Trip Time — total travel time in ms |
min |
Best (lowest) RTT across all packets |
avg |
Average RTT — typical latency baseline |
max |
Worst RTT — indicates latency spikes |
mdev |
Jitter — variance in latency over time |
TTL |
Time to Live — hops remaining on return |
Loss |
Percentage of packets that got no reply |
Understanding Ping Results
Not all latency is equal — context matters. A 10ms ping to a server in the same city is excellent; a 10ms ping across the Atlantic would be impossible. The following ranges are general guidelines based on geographic distance and typical internet routing.
| Latency Range | Rating | Typical Cause | Impact |
|---|---|---|---|
| Under 50ms | Excellent | Same region or nearby data center | No perceptible delay for any application |
| 50 – 150ms | Good | Cross-continent (e.g., US to Europe) | Fine for web apps and APIs; borderline for real-time |
| 150 – 300ms | Acceptable | Intercontinental (e.g., US to Asia) | Noticeable in real-time applications; acceptable for most web services |
| Over 300ms | High — investigate | Poor routing, congestion, satellite links | Significant delays; likely to cause user-facing issues |
Packet Loss
Any packet loss above 0% warrants investigation. Small amounts (1–2%) may be caused by ICMP deprioritization on busy routers — the router receives the packet just fine but delays or drops the ICMP reply to conserve resources for actual traffic. However, consistent packet loss or values above 5% typically point to a genuine network problem: congested links, misconfigured firewalls, or failing hardware.
If you see packet loss from many Emercom locations simultaneously, the issue is close to the target host. If only a few specific locations show loss, the problem may be regional routing or ISP peering.
Jitter
Jitter (sometimes shown as mdev in ping output) measures how much your latency varies between packets. Low jitter means a consistent, stable connection. High jitter — even with an acceptable average — can degrade real-time applications like VoIP, video conferencing, and online gaming significantly.
A server with 80ms average RTT and 2ms jitter will feel more reliable than one with 40ms average and 60ms jitter, because the unpredictability forces applications to buffer more data, increasing perceived lag.
Why Ping From Multiple Locations?
Running a ping from your own machine only tells you what the network looks like from your vantage point. A host might respond in 20ms for you but be completely unreachable from Asia, or show 800ms latency from South America due to suboptimal BGP routing.
Multi-location ping testing reveals:
- Regional outages — your server may be down in one geography while appearing fine in another
- ISP routing issues — traffic from specific providers or regions may be taking inefficient paths
- Geographic latency baselines — understand the natural physics-imposed minimum for each region before debugging
- CDN and anycast behavior — verify that users in different regions are hitting the nearest edge node
- Firewall and ACL gaps — ICMP may be blocked from some networks but not others
Emercom runs all 28 pings in parallel, so you get a complete global picture in seconds rather than having to manually test from multiple tools or VPN endpoints.
Emercom Ping Locations
Pings run from 28 servers across 16 countries on 5 continents, including nodes in North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, South America, and the Middle East.
Each location reports: min/avg/max RTT, jitter, and packet loss — so you can identify not just whether a host responds, but how consistently and quickly it does so from each region.
Want continuous ping monitoring?
Monitor ICMP reachability automatically and get alerts when latency spikes or hosts go down. 28 global locations. Under 30 seconds to alert.