Ping, Lag and NAT Type: A Gamer’s Guide to Testing Your Line

🎮 Your fibre is fast. Your ping is still 90. Both things can be true at once — and this guide shows you how to find out why, and exactly what to send us if it turns out to be our problem.

⚡ Speed and ping are not the same thing

This is the single biggest mix-up in gaming, so it is worth getting straight first.

• Speed is how much data fits down the pipe at once. It is what a speed test measures, and it is what you buy.
• Ping is how long one small packet takes to get to the game server and back. It is a measure of distance and delay, not size.

Upgrading from 50 Mbps to 1000 Mbps does not lower your ping, in the same way that widening a road does not make the trip to Cape Town shorter. Online games need almost no bandwidth — a competitive match uses a fraction of what a single video stream does. What games need is for the packets to arrive quickly and on time.

So if someone tells you to buy a faster package to fix lag, be sceptical. It usually will not.

🌍 Where the server is decides your ping

Nothing you buy, and nothing we install, can beat the speed of light. A packet takes a certain amount of time to travel a certain distance, and that is the floor. Here is what that floor actually looks like, measured on our own network in Durban:

This also explains something that puzzles a lot of players: how you can get a great ping in one game and a dreadful one in another, on the same line, on the same evening. Different games put their servers in different places, and you do not get a say in it. Call of Duty’s matchmaking runs out of Las Vegas — Activision publishes that openly — so from Durban it is around 300 ms, and there is no ISP anywhere that can shorten it. Plenty of other titles run South African servers in Johannesburg, and those land near 10 ms. Same connection, same night, thirty times the difference, decided entirely by where the game chose to put you.

Read that again, because it settles most arguments: a server in Johannesburg is about 10 ms away, and a server in Europe is about 170 ms away. If your game is showing you 170, you are not on a South African server, no matter what the menu says. And if it is showing you 300, you are playing on the other side of the planet.

🔌 What your game data actually travels through

Your packets pass through three quite different places on the way to a match. Knowing which is which is most of the diagnosis.

The important bit is the dotted line. Everything above it is ours and we can measure it precisely. Everything below it belongs to other networks and to the game company — and the game decides which server you play on, not your ISP. Matchmaking can move you to a different country between one match and the next, and when it does, your ping changes even though nothing about your line changed at all.

🧪 How to test properly

Six steps. Do them while the problem is actually happening — a test run the next morning when everything is fine tells us nothing.

• 1. Start at home: ping your own router. On Windows, open Command Prompt and type ping 192.168.0.1 -t (or whatever your router’s address is — the traceroute in step 4 shows it as the first hop). Let it run for a minute. Every reply should come back in about 1 ms with nothing lost. If you see dropped packets here, or times jumping around from 2 ms to 200 ms, the fault is inside your house — Wi-Fi interference, a bad cable, or a powerline adapter — and nothing further out is worth chasing until that is clean.
• 2. Use a cable, not Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi adds delay and drops packets in ways that look exactly like a network fault. If you cannot cable the console, say so in the ticket, because it changes how we read everything else.
• 3. Run a speed test — and read the ping, not the megabits. Pick a South African server. If the latency there is low but your game is high, that already tells us a lot.
• 4. Run a traceroute. On a Windows PC on the same network, open Command Prompt and type tracert 8.8.8.8. On a Mac, open Terminal and type traceroute 8.8.8.8. This prints the three parts from the diagram above, with a time next to each. Let it finish.
• 5. Leave a ping running. On Windows, ping 8.8.8.8 -t. On a Mac, ping 8.8.8.8. Leave it running, play until the problem happens, then stop it with Ctrl+C and keep the whole output — including the summary line at the end that shows how many packets were lost.
• 6. Test on another network. The cheapest and most revealing test of all: connect the console to your phone's hotspot and play a match. If it behaves the same way on a completely different network, the problem is not your line.

What step 1 can and cannot tell you. A clean result there is genuinely important — it clears your own network, which is where a surprising share of “lag” actually lives. But it only covers the first few metres. The packet never leaves your house, so a perfect router ping says nothing whatsoever about the path to the game server. It rules something out; it does not rule anything in.

📋 What to send us

If it still looks wrong after those five steps, open a ticket and include all of this. Every item is here because without it we genuinely cannot tell what happened.

• The exact date and time it happened — to the minute if you can. We keep detailed measurements of our own network, and a timestamp lets us look straight at that moment instead of guessing.
• The full output of the traceroute and the ping — copied text or a clear screenshot. The whole thing, not just the part that looked bad.
• Which game, and which mode. A ranked match and a casual match often use completely different servers.
• The server or region the game says you are on, if it shows one.
• Wired or Wi-Fi, and the make and model of your router.
• What happened on the hotspot test.
• Whether it is every evening, or only sometimes. A problem that appears at 20:00 and clears by 23:00 is a very different animal from one that is there all day, and we chase them differently.

A ticket with those seven things usually gets a real answer the same day. A ticket that says "my game is lagging" usually turns into a week of us asking for them one at a time — which is nobody's idea of fun.

🚫 What proves nothing

• A speed test result, on its own. It measures the wrong thing for this problem.
• The ping number the game shows you. It is a useful clue, but many games include their own server's processing time in it, so it is not a pure measure of the network.
• A clean ping to your own router, on its own. Worth doing, and it clears your home network — but it cannot show that a problem is or is not ours, because that packet never left your house.
• "My friend gets a better ping." Worth mentioning, but on its own it usually means their game put them on a different server, not that their ISP is better.

🎯 A quick word on "NAT Type"

Consoles report a NAT type — Open, Moderate, Strict, or sometimes Failed. It describes how easily other players can make a direct connection to your console, which matters for party chat and for hosting. It is not a speed or a quality rating, and a "Moderate" NAT is completely normal and perfectly playable for the vast majority of games.

If your console reports NAT Type Failed and party chat keeps dropping, that is worth a ticket — tell us the exact time it happened and we will look at it properly.

🤝 What we can see, and what we cannot

We would rather be straight with you about this than pretend otherwise.

We can measure every part of your journey up to the point where we hand your traffic to another network — continuously, and to a fraction of a millisecond. If a problem is inside our network, we can find it and we will tell you so.

We cannot see how busy a game company's servers are, how many players are on the machine you were put on, or how that company routes its own traffic. No ISP anywhere can see that. When a game server is overloaded on a Friday night, it feels identical to a network problem from where you are sitting — which is exactly why the tests above matter, because they tell the two apart.

One thing we can promise plainly: 123NET applies no fair-usage policy, no shaping and no throttling. We do not slow gaming traffic, we do not slow heavy users, and we do not slow anyone down at peak times. Whatever is happening to your match, it is not us doing it deliberately.

💬 Still stuck?

Do the six tests, grab the seven things, and open a ticket. Nobody at 123NET is offended by a well-documented complaint — it is the fastest possible route to an answer, and quite often that answer is that we found something and fixed it.

Game well. 🎮