[natdempk]

Random question, but how consistent should you expect to get pings to be over consumer internet to something like google? Single-digit ms variance? Few ms? 10's of ms? Always kind of curious for trying to optimize my network setup at home.

[dietsche]

you can get it down to nearly zero using OpenWRT and configuring SQM. Use https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat to measure and tune until you get an A+ result.

[zamadatix]

Before a bunch of people read this and become confused why their jitter didn't go to 0 "nothing you can do with your home network will ever make your jitter less than when you plug just your PC/Laptop directly into the ISP connection, let it get the public address, and only run a ping from it". Also things you do at home, such as use wireless, will often add a ms or two of occasional jitter even when you use a 6 GHz channel with extremely low contention and interference.

Bufferbloat is good thing to fix in general though and highlights why one should worry less about "how do single ICMP packets behave" and more about "how does actual loaded traffic of the protocol type I'm using behave in real usage". The results are often staggeringly different.