Ping is fast but web is slow

Network

I have my MacBook Pro connected to a cell-enabled iPad. Ping to stackexchange.com is less than 60 ms. But web pages are taking ages. A robot detector for a meta question has been there for several minutes, and the checkbox has still not appeared.

Mail is showing connection errors, as is iTunes. I don't think it's cell filtering, as various things have worked fine on other occasions. Maps was a little bit slow downloading imagery but not bad.

I thought perhaps having both USB and WiFi hotspot might be interfering with each other, but turning off WiFi didn't change anything.

The cell signal is poor in this apartment. But wouldn't that slow down ping by the same percentage as anything else?

Best Answer

Ping to stackexchange.com is less than 60 ms. But web pages are taking ages.

You're conflating Ping speed and actual download speed, something that can't be done.

Ping (how fast a small amount of data takes to travel) is different than download speed (how much data your computer can get through your router per second). It's download speed that determines how fast websites load, not your ping score (as an aside, a ping as high as 60ms indicates to me that your cellular connection is pretty slow, for me ~10ms comes with fast download speeds on LTE).

So how can you find out your download speed? Just search google for what's my download speed (or go to speedtest.net) to measure it. As a baseline, any speed 25 Mbps or faster means the web page will load at a speed I would perceive as "fast" and any speed below 2 Mbps is close to unbearable.

tl;dr: Having low ping does not mean websites will necessarily load fast; download speeds determine how fast a webpage will load.

Related Solutions

4G iPod Touch internet speed incredibly slow with B/G WiFi router but fast with N

It is quite normal to see a real difference between 802.11b, g and n wireless networks. The maximum network speed you can reach on this 3 different standards are:

IEEE     |        max speed        | ratio relative
standard |  radio     |  practical | to 802.11b
---------|------------|------------|---------------
802.11b  |  11 Mbit/s |   5 Mbit/s |   1
802.11g  |  54 Mbit/s |  25 Mbit/s |   5
802.11n  | 270 Mbit/s | 120 Mbit/s |  24

On the other hand, 802.11b, g and n use different radio channels. You may consider these channels as different roads with different speed limits and different amounts of traffic. Some of these channels may be free when others may be congested.

Your problem isn't a problem, but rather the radiowave reality. If you want to see it and even bring it under control,
I advise you to use iStumbler. This is an invaluable tool for wireless network tuning.

AirPort Extreme: slow upload via ethernet, but fast via wireless

I fixed this by playing around with my network settings. In System Preferences > Network > Ethernet 1 > Advanced > Hardware I manually set the Speed to "100baseTX" and Duplex to "full-duplex" and my upload speeds have returned to normal.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

4G iPod Touch internet speed incredibly slow with B/G WiFi router but fast with N

AirPort Extreme: slow upload via ethernet, but fast via wireless

Related Question