Can upload speed affect ping? [REVEALED]

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Aren’t you a little confused by now about hearing a lot of different terminology about the internet? Terms like upload speed, download speed, ping, latency, jitter, and much more?

Do they have any effect on each other?

I know this is lots of confusing stuff but in today’s blog, we will prove why upload speed and ping do not affect each other in any way.

We will also define what ping means, the difference between download and upload speed, and best of all, we will give some tips on how to lower your ping.

I hope you are excited to get on this journey with us so let’s talk about what ping means.

Read also: Can upload speed affect gaming? [EXPLAINED]

What does ping mean?

Ping, also known as latency is the time it takes to send a package to another location, and the network and ping are measured in ms (short for milliseconds).

Ping answers the question about how fast your data travels through the network.

Packet Internet or Inter-Network Groper (ping) is mostly used for knowing if a host or IP destination exists and how fast your data can be sent towards or from that host or destination.

The faster your data can travel, the shorter the ping will be. This means that the lower the number in milliseconds, the better it is for your network.

A fun history fact

Ping received its name from the sound sonar makes because the concept is more or less the same.

Ping has received its name from the sound sonar
Ping has received its name from the sound sonar

The difference between download and upload speed

To know what the difference is between download and upload speed we first need to know what each of them is.

Download speed

Download speed is the amount of data you can receive from the internet in a second. This is measured in Mbps or Mb/s.

Upload speed

Upload speed is the amount of data that you can send through the network in a second and is also measured in Mbps or Mb/s

The difference between the download and upload speed simply lies in the direction that which your data needs to flow.

For Example

A road has 2 lanes with 1 going away from you and 1 coming towards you.

The difference between download and upload speed
The difference between download and upload speed

This means that only one car can go at a time and only one car can come at a time. The car going in this example means the upload speed and the car coming means the download speed. If we would increase the lanes of the road having 2 lanes going and 2 lanes coming we can now have 2 cars going or coming at the same time. This means the more download speed you have, the more data can be downloaded at the same time and the more upload speed you have, the more data can be received in the same amount of time.

Why ping has nothing to do with your upload speed

Now that we have defined what the terminology means we can explain why the ping and the upload speed have nothing to do with each other and therefore cannot affect each other in any way.

We will use the above road example so it’s easier to understand. If the road is 10 kilometers long and the car drives at a speed of 10km/h it would take the car an hour to reach you. Think of the ping as the speed at which the car drives on the road. Increasing the lanes of the road will not affect the time it takes the car to reach the end of the road because we have done nothing with the speed of the car. The only difference when we increase the lanes of the road is that we can now send 2 cards at once instead of only one but it will still take both cars an hour to reach their destination.

Why ping has nothing to do with your upload speed
Why ping has nothing to do with your upload speed

In the above example, ping can be seen as the travel time of the car and unless you increase the speed of the car (lower your ping) the data will not reach the destination any faster in the next section of this blog we will find out how to do just that.

How to lower your ping

Lowering your ping is not something you can do without breaking a sweat but we will try to simplify it as much as possible. Just like in the above road example, we must ask ourselves what we can do the make the car travel faster on the road

  1. Hardware & Software Upgrades:
    The first thing we think about is getting a faster car or upgrading the car so it can drive faster. In the same way, we can choose to upgrade our hardware or software (router, ethernet card, drivers, and settings) to insure not have any problems there. Most of the time this is not an issue since most people frequently update or upgrade their systems.
  2. Fixing the road:
    If a road has holes or speed bumps it makes it hard for a car to travel faster. The same goes for network and latency problems. Connecting to a wired network instead of wifi can make a great difference. Upgrading or renewing your wires is also a good way to go. The downside of this is that there is a small part on your side that you can control but most of it happens on the side of your Internet Service Provider. Contacting your Internet Service Provider may be necessary to fix the issues so you can decrease your ping.

Conclusion

In today’s blog, we have learned what all these different terms mean that we read regularly and finally put a stop to all the confusion that these terms bring. 

We now know that the difference between upload and download speed is only in the direction that your data needs to travel. We learned why there is no relation between the upload speed and ping and in our example, we explain this in depth. We gave some tips on how to lower your ping and we hope you can benefit greatly from these tips.