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More specifically, what is your local WLAN ping time (e.g., between a host on the WLAN and your router, or between two hosts on the WLAN, divided by 2)?
I had assumed it would be well under 1 ms for my uncontested (one of the few benefits of being in the middle of nowhere) 802.11n network, but it's consistently at 3 to 4ms when I ping my router or any wired host on my network:
WLAN host to router:
$ ping 192.168.0.1
PING 192.168.0.1 (192.168.0.1): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 192.168.0.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=3.692 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.0.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=3.682 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.0.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=3.170 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.0.1: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=3.878 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.0.1: icmp_seq=4 ttl=64 time=3.734 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.0.1: icmp_seq=5 ttl=64 time=3.891 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.0.1: icmp_seq=6 ttl=64 time=3.860 ms
^C
--- 192.168.0.1 ping statistics ---
7 packets transmitted, 7 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 3.170/3.701/3.891/0.232 ms
WLAN host to wired host (first ping time is probably just ARP resolution):
$ ping 192.168.0.102
PING 192.168.0.102 (192.168.0.102): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 192.168.0.102: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=47.740 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.0.102: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=3.928 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.0.102: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=3.855 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.0.102: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=3.739 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.0.102: icmp_seq=4 ttl=64 time=4.174 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.0.102: icmp_seq=5 ttl=64 time=4.367 ms
For reference, ping times to/from the same hardware is about 0.2 ms on ethernet.
BeeOnRope
Posted 2014-09-15T09:35:44.757
Reputation: 744
WLAN to router between 1 and 2 ms, LAN to router <1 to 1 ms on my network – DavidPostill – 2014-09-15T09:44:44.260
2Why do you care how fast your router can respond to pings? People who design routers design them to route packets as quickly as possible, but they don't particularly care how quickly they respond to pings. You're just measuring how good your router happens to be at a task it's most definitely not optimized for. – David Schwartz – 2014-09-15T10:52:09.637
Partly because of curiosity, and partly because it's helpful to diagnose performance issues. FWIW, I included the "host to host" ping as well, which has slightly worse timings and excludes your fanciful theory that routers somehow respond slowly to pings but route packets quickly (unless you also believe that the router is deep inspecting my ICMP packets to other hosts on the network and slowing them down too to make everything consistent). – BeeOnRope – 2014-09-15T12:50:46.500