[snippyhollow]

I have 300/100mbps down/up fiber in Paris. As important as the bandwidth is the latency. Basically it means I do most of my work SSHed (mosh'ed actually) to a cluster and don't notice I'm working from home or the company's network. Streaming plots or even videos for debugging is seamless.

[0xFFC]

Is there any scientific way for measuring latency ? ping'ing seems kind of stupid for measuring right latency of connection.(Maybe I am wrong and ping is reliable way) .

[MichaelGG]

What about ping seems stupid? It seems really straightforward - send something out and wait for the echo.

[click170]

One caveat with using ping is that ISPs can very easily prioritize that traffic, so you could see results from ping that you might not see in your application.

[amalcon]

Pinging works pretty well, but not perfectly. ICMP echo is treated specially by many "traffic shaping" appliances. Firewalls frequently blanket-drop pings from outside, and sometimes pings are given higher priority to aid in diagnostics.

Usually it's noticeable when this is going on (especially the blocking), so you only need to go to some other solution when you notice this.

[anewhnaccount]

Try tcptraceroute for comparison. Or you can eg, open up Wireshark, make a real connection and look at the relative times on packets for a real connection. Ping gives you a starting point, usually "best case".