For those of you that have visited the Purple offices you will know that it’s not often the word ‘Ping’ is uttered and not immediately followed by the word ‘Pong’, especially amongst the male members of staff who take the game very seriously! But for the sake of this month’s Jargon Buster we are doing just that.
The ping system was written by a senior scientist, Mike Muus and was intended to be used as a tool to help troubleshoot different internet systems. It works by sending small amounts of data, known as packets to a target host and then measuring the reply. The programme will then report any errors, lost packets as well as the time it took for the network to respond. Lost packets or widely varying response times are a good indication that there may be an issue with your connection. By pinging multiple computers it is also possible to identify issues and reroute data more efficiently.
If this all sounds very technical, don’t panic! The chances are that the only person in your home who will be concerned with ping are those who like to play online gaming where a poor connection can sometimes make the difference between a knarly kill shot and finding yourself respawning.
If you would like to perform a ping test there are lots of handy resources online that have made this very user friendly. Websites like PingTest perform the test with one click and are even give you a very untechnical quality rating graded from A+!