Reading Ping Output

Ping prints two useful things, and people usually read the wrong one.

The time on each reply is the round trip in milliseconds. It tells you how far away the machine is, in network terms. A few milliseconds is the same building, a couple of hundred is the other side of the world.

The loss figure in the summary matters more. Zero loss with a slow time means a distant but healthy connection. Partial loss, say 20 percent, is the genuinely bad sign: something is dropping messages, and that shows up as a connection that works, then stalls, then works again.

So: time tells you how far, loss tells you how healthy. When someone reports "the network is slow", the loss figure is the one that identifies a real fault.