Packet Loss Test^™

What If There Is No Server near Me?

I try to distribute servers throughout the world, but I cannot afford to put a server in every country. Therefore, I try to put servers in locations where they can serve a greater region, though I know this isn't perfect. When it comes down to it, I have to look at how many people will benefit from adding a server, how much it will shorten their communication time, and how much a server in that location costs.

Because of this, many locations are going to necessarily have higher latencies to their nearest servers, and therefore artificially high pings in their test results.

While I wish I could have servers everywhere, I can't practically do that. Ultimately, the primary purpose of this site is to test packet loss, not latency. More servers are not required for that task as the packet loss should not be in any way affected by your distance from the server. No matter where you are, you should get an accurate result on packet loss with any server in the list. Only your latency will be different.

Furthermore, while your latency will be inflated, it should at least be consistent. If you are just on the other side of the Atlantic, it will probably add roughly 80 milliseconds to your ping. Therefore if your results say 120ms, you can simply subtract the extra and see that your local ping is really 40ms. You can confirm this difference with something like Meter.net, which will show your ping to basically everywhere on earth. The lowest number will be the latency in your local connection, which you can compare to the ping to the location of the Packet Loss Test server.

For example, below is an example of what good and bad connections look like for a user in Chicago. How good a latency is depends entirely on how far you are from the server. If you can figure out what your latency to a place should be, you can easily figure out how good your actual latency is by just subtracting.

All that said, I am always interested in expanding coverage. I have basic analytics included and monitor them to see where people need them most. You can always feel free to contact me also, and if you have an extra server in an interesting place you're open to running some lightweight software on, I would appreciate any contribution.