Internet 101 October 29, 2026 7 min read

What is latency, and why it matters for gaming and video calls

Latency is the delay between an action and a response, measured in milliseconds. Here's what counts as good, what causes lag, and how to lower yours.

Latency and speed are not the same thing

The distinction is worth getting right, because they’re measured and fixed differently.

Speed, or bandwidth, is how much data can move at once. Think of it as how wide the road is.

Latency is how long a single piece of data takes to make the round trip. That’s how long one car takes to drive there and back, and it doesn’t much care how wide the road is.

Widening a road doesn’t make any individual trip shorter. That’s why upgrading from 300 Mbps to a gigabit won’t fix lag, and why a modest connection with low latency often feels snappier than a big one with high latency. Streaming a movie needs a wide road, since it moves a lot of data and can buffer ahead. A game needs a short trip, because it’s constantly asking “what just happened?” and waiting for an answer.

Underneath the analogy, every packet travels through cable, fiber, or air to a server and back, passing through switches and routers, and each step costs a fraction of a millisecond.

What the numbers actually mean

Latency shows up as “ping” in speed tests and games:

Under 20 ms. Excellent. Everything feels instant, including competitive gaming.
20 to 50 ms. Good. Fine for essentially everything, including gaming and video calls.
50 to 100 ms. Acceptable for browsing, streaming, and calls. Fast-paced games start to feel slightly behind.
100 to 150 ms. Noticeable. Conversations develop awkward pauses, games feel unresponsive.
Above 150 ms. Problematic. People talk over each other on calls and competitive gaming is frustrating.

For reference, giggle’s plans have a typical latency of around 20 ms.

One more number worth knowing: jitter, which measures how much your latency varies from moment to moment. Steady 40 ms is far better than latency that bounces between 20 and 150. Jitter is what makes a call fine for a minute and then garbled, and it’s often the real culprit when latency looks acceptable on a test.

What causes high latency

Several things, and they stack.

Distance to the server. Data travels fast but not instantly. A game server in another country will generally have higher latency than one nearby, and no plan fixes geography.

Your connection type. This is the big one. Wired connections tend to provide lower and more consistent latency than wireless home internet, because the signal travels a direct path instead of sharing the air. 5G home internet reaches a tower shared with every phone nearby, and satellite involves a trip to orbit and back, which sets a floor on how low latency can go.

WiFi versus ethernet. Your home wireless adds a few milliseconds and, more importantly, adds variability. A weak signal in a far bedroom causes retransmissions, and retransmissions cause jitter.

Network congestion. When the connection is saturated, packets queue. This is why latency spikes when someone starts a large upload, a phenomenon called bufferbloat.

Old equipment. A router several years past its prime adds processing delay of its own.

Why gamers care most

In a fast online game, your input has to reach the server, the server has to decide what happened, and the result has to come back to your screen. At 20 ms that loop is imperceptible. At 120 ms you’re acting on a picture of the world that’s already out of date, which is why two players can both “hit” and only one registers.

It’s also why a gamer with a modest plan and an ethernet cable will out-perform someone on a gigabit over marginal WiFi.

Why video calls care too

Calls are more forgiving than games, but they fail more socially. Human conversation depends on turn-taking measured in tenths of a second, so when latency climbs past roughly 150 ms each way, people start talking over each other and then over-correcting into long pauses. Nobody identifies it as a network problem. It just feels like a bad conversation. Jitter produces the clipped or robotic word in an otherwise fine call.

How to test your latency

Most speed tests report ping alongside download and upload. That figure is your latency to the test server.

For a meaningful reading, test first on a device connected by ethernet cable, which tells you what the connection itself delivers. Then test over WiFi in the room where you have problems. The gap between the two is your wireless overhead. Test during busy evening hours too, and watch whether the number jumps around rather than just how high it is.

How to lower it

In rough order of how much they help:

Plug in. An ethernet cable to your console, desktop, or work laptop is the most effective fix available, and it costs almost nothing.
Improve your WiFi if you can’t wire in. Better router placement, the 5 GHz band for nearby devices, and a mesh point for distant rooms all reduce retransmissions and jitter.
Prioritize the right traffic. giggleWiFi+ includes Game Mode and Work Mode for exactly this, which helps most when the house is busy.
Check what’s running in the background. A large cloud backup or game download saturating your upload will spike latency for everything else.
Update or replace old equipment. A router more than about five years old often adds delay on its own.
Look at your connection type. If you’re on 5G home internet or satellite, a lot of what drives your latency sits outside the house, so tuning inside it only goes so far. A wired connection generally helps.

The takeaway

Latency decides whether your internet feels responsive, and it’s the one number nobody advertises. If gaming feels laggy or calls keep stepping on each other, checking your ping tells you more than another speed test will.

If you’re fighting lag on a wireless connection, we’re happy to talk through whether a wired plan would help. Check availability at your address in about a minute, and if we’re not the right fix we’ll say so.

giggle fiber

Ready for better internet?

Fiber internet starting at $29.95/mo with no contracts, no data caps, and free installation. See if giggle fiber is available in your neighborhood.

Check availiability View plans

Frequently Asked Questions

What is latency in internet terms?
Latency is the delay between sending a request and receiving a response, measured in milliseconds and often shown as “ping.” It’s separate from speed: speed measures how much data moves at once, while latency measures how long a single round trip takes.

What is a good latency for gaming?
Under 20 ms is excellent and 20 to 50 ms is good for nearly all games. Between 50 and 100 ms, fast-paced competitive games begin to feel slightly delayed. Above 100 ms, gaming becomes noticeably unresponsive.

Does a faster internet plan reduce latency?
Not usually. Speed and latency are different measurements, so adding bandwidth doesn’t shorten the round trip. Latency is affected far more by your connection type, by wired versus wireless, by network congestion, and by how far away the server is.

Why does my video call keep cutting out even though my internet is fast?
The likely causes are latency and jitter rather than bandwidth. Jitter, meaning latency that varies moment to moment, garbles audio because the call can’t buffer against a moving target. A wired connection and better WiFi coverage both help.

How do I test my internet latency?
Run a speed test and look at the ping result. Test first on a device connected by ethernet cable to measure the connection itself, then over WiFi in the room where you have trouble. Testing during busy evening hours shows the most realistic picture.

Check availability to see the speeds and plans offered at your address.