It's better to test your internet speed and capacity than ping times. My dl/ul speeds are 2.6 mb per second. I once downloaded a 1.6 gigabyte movie in 25 minutes. The server was pretty fast my ping time to YHOO was 3 ms google was 79 ms elitetrader was 116 ms
Wrong, a sinple tracert will not show you were a delay is, unless you know the specific configurations of each server. it is perfectly normal to see times of 200ms in the midle of a tracert while the last hop in 40ms. All it generally will mean is that echo requests have a lower priority on the individual server. It is not a problem whatsoever. Think about it, if you keep doing a tracert (really its a traceroute, tracert is just a dos program.) over and over to yahoo.com you'll likely keep on seeing 200ms somewere in the middle but the end result yahoo.com is 40ms. its passing through all of those servers and only taking 40ms, but if you ping them individualy like a traceroute does, it will have a lower priority therefor might have a higer time. i'm not sure exactly what your saying, but if you are saying distance is a big factor, your not copletely correct. the actualy distance of the cabling has a very insignificant impact on latency, it is the servers (ie hops) that cause latency. (ping times are a measurement of latency, in a laymans sense.) actually being on dialup will make a significant difference even with all other things being equal. The analog to digital conversion is a decent factor, among intereference on pots (plain old telephone system) that causes problems with analog signals. Cable and DSL are digital from the computer which is much more resiliant from noise. That depends on what you want to do. If your downloading huge files bandwidth is more importannt, but if your doing nothing more than trading and only care about executions speeds, the pinng times are really all that matter. you can't just come on here and say one is better than the other, it depends on what you are doing.
I'm no expert, so excuse me if I wrote something wrong in my above post but what I meant to say is this : If I (from Europe) do a tracert to a US server, I see most time is needed to cross the ocean (of course). Perhaps the word "delay" was used wrong (I'm not a native speaker) and should be something like "time consuming" This for the first
60 ms from NW Washington to servers in AZ (Comcast). I've seen 0 ms across Washington on light fiber courtesy of Bonneville Power Administration. This also included bandwidth of 15 mbps. This probably translates into something like 15 ms across the US if the connection were contiguous.