Why does pinging my friend have higher than expected ping times?

Question

Why does pinging my friend that lives in the same city, hires the same ISP, and who also lives 30 miles away from my neighborhood show a slightly higher ping (20 ms) than pinging a local server from my ISP (5 ms)?

It takes only 2 hops to reach his house and then back. Shouldn't I get (at least) the same ping to him just like the server from my ISP?

This is completely abnormal. Why does it cost me a few milliseconds long to reach his house and back? I'm 100% sure that our connection is perfectly fine. He lives way too close to me, but why? Please someone explain to me, this is so frustrating.

Answer 1

That's definitely a pretty normal ping. Just because you get 5 ms ping to your local dedicated server, doesn't necessarily mean that you'll get exactly the same ping times to your friend. And that's utterly impossible. (Due to some restrictions that were applied to the connection itself)

There are some factors to take into accounting though, like what kind of service do you and your friend use, and how does your ISP routes their traffic between their customers. (It can be many times different than what a simple traceroute to your beloved server will be)

Usually, The main factor that affects how higher and lower your ping times will be to both the server and your friend is how much firewall (Interleaved mode depth) is applied in your line that delays your signals/packets from your home connection to the internet cabinet you're connecting to. Unfortunately, this is out of your control, because the internet cabinet knows exactly what's ideal for your connection.

However, you can ask your ISP to lower your link latency and then go into some trivial details and such. But since you're not suffering from high ping times, then you should be fine. And your ping to your friend is excellent! You should be happy with it.

Answer 2

This is pretty normal. Let him do a ping to that local server as well, and you'll likely see that he has a slightly higher ping than you.

Then, when you ping to him, you're not pinging directly to him, but you're pinging to your isp, who relays that to your friend. He then responds, and the ISP relays that ping back to you. So 5ms x2 = 10ms, but his connection is probably a bit slower, so lets say... 15 ms for the ping itself. Then there's the additional time required on the network itself at the ISP side. It is possible they'll send the ping to an outband router and back into the internal router which likely creates the additional 5 ms.

Yes, how the ISP does its networking is speculation, but this behavior is expected behavior.

To get a detailed graph on where the delay is forming, do a tracert with his ip address and see where it becomes slow.