Quick answer: To reduce ping, use a wired Ethernet connection instead of Wi-Fi, close background applications that consume bandwidth, choose game or app servers closest to your location, restart your router and modem, update your network drivers, and if the problem persists contact your internet service provider. For businesses, professional network optimization identifies bandwidth conflicts (backups, syncs, security scans) that individual fixes cannot solve.
Typical ping targets:
Estimated fix time: 5 to 30 minutes for the do-it-yourself steps below.
Ping is one of the most misunderstood numbers in networking. A user who upgrades their internet plan from 50 Mbps to 500 Mbps and sees the same lag in a Teams call, the same rubber-banding in a game, the same choppy Zoom feed is usually surprised because bandwidth and latency measure two different things. Bandwidth is how much water can flow through a pipe. Latency, measured as ping, is how fast a single drop travels from one end to the other.
For Canadian small and mid-sized businesses, the cost of high ping is not theoretical. According to the 2026 Canadian Digital Adoption Survey by Statistics Canada, more than 78% of Canadian SMBs now rely on real-time cloud services (Microsoft 365, video conferencing, VoIP, cloud accounting) for daily operations. When ping is high, every one of those services degrades dropped calls with clients, frozen presentations during pitches, spreadsheet edits that lose data. The Canadian Centre for Cyber Security's 2025-2026 National Cyber Threat Assessment also notes that unstable network performance is one of the most common reasons employees bypass corporate VPNs and security controls, creating downstream risk.
This guide walks through what causes high ping, how to reduce it, and when it makes sense to bring in professional help.
GAM Tech has supported Canadian SMBs and their network performance challenges from Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver, Toronto, and Montréal since 2012. What follows is the same diagnostic sequence our engineers use when a client calls about "slow internet" starting with the fixes any user can try, and escalating to the business-grade solutions only an MSP can implement.
Ping measures the round-trip time it takes for a small packet of data to travel from your device to a server and back. It is expressed in milliseconds (ms). A ping of 30 ms means the round trip took 30 thousandths of a second. A ping of 300 ms means the round trip took nearly a third of a second long enough for a video call to stutter and a game character to seem to teleport.
The word "ping" comes from the Unix ping utility, itself named after the sound of sonar a signal sent out, a signal returned, and the time between the two measured.
Upgrading your internet plan increases bandwidth but rarely changes latency. If your current connection is not saturated, more Mbps will not lower your ping.
For Canadian businesses running Microsoft Teams, Zoom, VoIP, and cloud collaboration tools, a working target is under 100 ms with jitter below 30 ms.
Before jumping to fixes, understand what typically causes latency to spike. In our experience supporting hundreds of Canadian SMBs, high ping almost always traces back to one of four categories.
Speed sets the ceiling for what your connection can handle. If your bandwidth is being fully consumed by cloud backups, streaming video, large file transfers, or too many concurrent users new packets have to wait in line, and ping climbs. Business-grade internet typically requires substantially more headroom than the marketing brochure suggests, because business traffic is bursty and simultaneous.
Even connections that appear to have spare capacity can suffer from congestion at layers a user cannot see. Office networks are especially prone to invisible congestion: Windows updates downloading across dozens of machines simultaneously, OneDrive and SharePoint sync running during work hours, antivirus scans scheduled mid-morning, security tools uploading logs to the cloud. Individually each one is small; together they compete for the same pipe as your Teams call.
Different activities demand different amounts of throughput. A 4K video call, a cloud CAD session, an on-line backup, and a large file transfer are all bandwidth-heavy tasks that will push latency up if the network is not sized or prioritized correctly. This is why Quality of Service (QoS) rules which reserve priority for real-time traffic matter so much in a business context.
Consumer-grade routers, aging switches, and 10-year-old wiring were designed for a handful of devices at modest speeds. A 30-employee office running that gear will hit ping ceilings even on a fast fibre connection. Firmware that has not been updated in years introduces additional latency and often re-introduces bugs that have long since been patched.
The steps below work for both individual users and small offices. Try them in order the earliest ones cost nothing and take a minute or two, and the later ones require a bit more work but address the root causes most likely to produce lasting results.
If you take away one fix from this list, take this one. Wi-Fi is convenient but introduces variable latency from interference, distance, and shared airtime with every other wireless device in the building. A wired Ethernet connection is faster, more stable, and lower latency in almost every scenario. In many offices, moving critical workstations (finance, video calls, remote support) from Wi-Fi to wired cuts ping in half.
Every open application that touches the network a paused video streaming in a background tab, a Dropbox client syncing photos, a Slack notification loop, a Windows Update download in progress competes for bandwidth. Close what you are not actively using. On business machines, group policies can enforce this automatically during working hours.
Physical distance matters. A packet that travels to a data centre in Toronto and back is going to arrive faster than one that has to reach Sydney or Frankfurt. For gaming, select the server region closest to you. For cloud services (Microsoft 365, AWS, Google Cloud), ensure your tenant is configured to use Canadian data centres this is a common misconfiguration that can quietly add 50–100 ms of latency to every request.
Run a speed test (Speedtest.net, fast.com, or your ISP's own tool) to confirm you are actually getting the bandwidth you are paying for. Test at different times of day. If your peak-hour speed is consistently a fraction of your advertised speed, contact your ISP. If speeds are fine but ping is still high, the problem is not bandwidth it is elsewhere on this list.
The classic "turn it off and on again" step exists because it works. Unplug the modem and router, wait 30 seconds, plug the modem in first and let it fully connect, then plug the router in. This clears memory leaks, forces new IP negotiations, and often resolves ping issues that have crept in over weeks of uptime. If a restart fixes it every few days but the problem always returns, the device itself is the problem.
Manufacturers regularly release firmware updates that fix latency bugs, close security holes, and improve throughput. Check your router's admin page for a firmware update option. On your computer, update your network adapter drivers through Device Manager (Windows) or System Settings (macOS). Outdated drivers are a common, invisible cause of jitter and ping spikes.
If you have a client call, an important game, or a large upload starting, pause any automatic updates. Windows Update, cloud sync clients, and streaming services can all be paused temporarily. On business networks, tools like Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) let IT schedule updates for off-hours across every machine automatically.
If you have worked through the first seven steps and ping is still high, the problem is upstream of your equipment. Call your internet service provider, describe what you have already tried, and ask them to run a line test. Business customers have more leverage here than residential users: an ISP that will not act on a residential ticket will often escalate the same issue for a business account with a service level agreement.
Some ping problems are individual. Others are structural. If you are experiencing any of the following, the fixes above will help but will not permanently resolve the issue, and it is worth bringing in professional network management:
A managed IT partner can identify what individual fixes cannot: the interaction between your ISP, your equipment, your users' behaviour, and your cloud services. That is the domain where 20 ms of hidden latency across every request accumulates into hours of lost productivity a week.
GAM Tech has been optimizing business networks for Canadian SMBs since 2012 from our headquarters in Calgary, with offices in Edmonton, Red Deer, Vancouver, Victoria, Toronto, Ottawa, and Montréal. Our approach to ping and latency problems has four parts.
Comprehensive network assessment. We measure actual bandwidth versus advertised, map where latency is being introduced across your LAN, WAN, and cloud connections, and identify silent bandwidth hogs (unpatched backup jobs, misconfigured sync clients, chatty security tools).
Quality of Service implementation. We configure your switches, routers, and firewalls to prioritize real-time traffic (voice, video, remote support) over bulk traffic (backups, downloads, updates), so a Teams call does not degrade every time OneDrive kicks off a sync.
Infrastructure right-sizing. Consumer or prosumer equipment is usually the ceiling on what a growing office can achieve. We assess whether your switches, access points, and firewalls match your actual usage and recommend upgrades that pay for themselves in recovered productivity.
Continuous monitoring and vendor management. Our 24/7 network monitoring detects ping spikes and packet loss the moment they happen, often before users notice. When the issue traces back to your ISP, we negotiate with the vendor on your behalf, armed with monitoring data that residential complaints will never win.
GAM Tech is a Canadian-owned, independent managed IT service provider. We serve businesses with 20 to 500 users across Alberta, British Columbia, Ontario, and Québec the same profile that most often struggles with the kind of network performance issues this article describes.
We are SOC 2 certified and a Certified B Corporation. We are ranked #97 globally and #1 in Western Canada on the 2026 MSP 501, and have been named to Canada's Top 50 Best Managed IT Companies for five consecutive years (2021 through 2025). ESET Canada named us MSP Partner of the Year in both 2024 and 2025, and we are Great Place to Work-Certified with placements on both the Best Workplaces in Canada and Best Workplaces in Technology 2026 lists.
Every plan we offer Silver, Gold, and Platinum includes 24/7/365 support with a 5-minute response commitment, delivered on 99%+ of tickets. Every client has a named Client Success Manager for strategic direction, backed by a real help desk team for day-to-day tickets never one person doing both jobs.
Our Silver plan starts at $110 per managed device per month, with a $1,000 monthly minimum. Professional services (network assessments, migrations, deployments, configuration changes) are included on the majority of IT projects a rare model in the MSP world where most providers charge for professional services separately.
Ottawa and Montréal support is available in both English and French.
Network performance is not usually thought of as a compliance issue, but for Canadian businesses in regulated industries it often is. Under the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) and provincial equivalents (Quebec's Law 25, Alberta's PIPA, British Columbia's PIPA), businesses are responsible for the confidentiality and integrity of personal information they handle which means the tools they use to move that information (VPNs, cloud backups, encrypted messaging) must actually work.
When ping is high, employees often bypass secure tools. The 2025-2026 National Cyber Threat Assessment from the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security identifies this exact pattern: workers switch off VPNs, upload files to consumer file-sharing services, or move data onto personal devices "just this once" because the corporate tool is unusable. Each of those workarounds is a compliance incident waiting to happen.
For regulated sectors specifically healthcare (PHIPA in Ontario, PHIA in Nova Scotia, HIA in Alberta), financial services (OSFI cyber guidelines, PIPEDA), and legal (provincial law societies' technology-competence rules) the reliability of the network is inseparable from the reliability of the compliance posture. A network that forces workarounds is a network that produces breaches.
A good ping is under 50 ms for most uses. Under 20 ms is excellent and ideal for competitive gaming or real-time voice. Between 50 and 100 ms is playable for most games and usable for video conferencing but starts to feel laggy. Anything above 100 ms usually causes noticeable delay in real-time applications. For business video conferencing on Microsoft Teams or Zoom, aim for under 100 ms with jitter below 30 ms for reliable call quality.
The most common causes of high ping are a slow or congested internet connection, using Wi-Fi instead of a wired Ethernet connection, background applications consuming bandwidth (Windows updates, cloud sync, streaming), too many devices sharing the network, outdated router firmware, choosing a distant server, or ISP throttling during peak hours. In office environments, invisible bandwidth hogs like scheduled backups, security scans, and Microsoft 365 sync are often the culprits behind unexplained ping spikes.
Not usually. Ping is about latency (how fast signals travel), not bandwidth (how much data can flow). Upgrading from 50 Mbps to 500 Mbps typically does not reduce ping at all if your existing connection was not saturated. Upgrading only helps ping if your current bandwidth is being consistently maxed out by too many devices or high-bandwidth activities. Focus on wired connections, closing background apps, and choosing local servers before upgrading your internet plan.
Usually not. A VPN typically increases ping because your traffic takes an extra hop through the VPN server. In rare cases a VPN can reduce ping if your ISP is deliberately routing traffic inefficiently or throttling specific services, but this is uncommon. If you need to use a VPN and want lower ping, choose a VPN server geographically close to the game server or service you are accessing.
No. 0 ms ping is physically impossible because signals have to travel a physical distance at (at most) the speed of light. Even connecting to a server in your own city typically shows 5–10 ms minimum due to routing overhead. The lowest realistic ping most people can achieve is around 1–5 ms to nearby servers with a wired connection and an optimized network.
Ping spikes usually indicate another device or application starting a heavy bandwidth task in the background, Wi-Fi interference from other networks or physical obstacles, ISP-level congestion during peak hours, driver issues with your network adapter, or a failing router that needs a reset or replacement. In office environments, scheduled tasks like antivirus scans, backup jobs, and software update rollouts commonly cause ping spikes at predictable times of day identifying the pattern is the first step to fixing it.
Business network optimization requires Quality of Service rules that prioritize real-time traffic (video calls, VoIP) over background traffic (backups, downloads), business-grade routers and access points sized for the user count, wired connections at every workstation where possible, bandwidth-heavy tasks scheduled during off-hours, monitoring tools that identify which applications are consuming bandwidth, and a dedicated internet connection sized for actual business needs (not the residential "up to X Mbps" marketing). GAM Tech provides this level of network management for Canadian SMBs across our eight offices.
At GAM Tech, network optimization is included in our managed IT service plans. Silver plans start at $110 per managed device per month with a $1,000 monthly minimum, and cover 24/7 network monitoring, ISP escalation, firmware and driver management, and Quality of Service configuration. For businesses that are not on a managed plan, a one-time network assessment starts with a free consultation to scope the work, followed by a fixed-price recommendation.
Practically speaking, no. Lower is always better for real-time applications. In competitive gaming, some players wonder whether a very low ping (under 5 ms) can create a "matching" problem with other players on higher-ping connections this is a game-server matchmaking artifact, not a network problem, and it is not something to try to increase your ping to solve.
Ping is the round-trip time of a single packet. Jitter is the variation in ping over time. A connection with an average ping of 30 ms but jitter of 60 ms will feel much worse than one with a steady ping of 60 ms and jitter of 5 ms. For voice and video calls, jitter is often more important than the ping average VoIP systems can compensate for latency, but not for wildly variable latency.
High ping is not just a gaming problem. For Canadian businesses, latency is what makes the difference between a Teams call that closes the deal and a Teams call that drops in the middle of the pitch. It is what makes cloud tools feel modern or ancient. It is what causes employees to bypass VPNs, work around IT, and quietly create the compliance risks that end up on the front page of the paper.
The eight steps in this guide will solve the majority of individual ping problems. The structural problems the ones that show up as recurring, unexplained slowness across the whole office require a partner who can see the network as a whole system.
Contact GAM Tech to discuss network optimization for your business. Call toll-free 1-833-GAM-TECH (1-833-426-8324) or book a free 30-minute consultation at gamtech.ca/book-a-consultation.
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