Lag Pong — play Pong at your real ping

How to play

1. 1Pick a lag: your own ping from the speed test, or a typical fibre, 5G, fixed LTE, European-server or satellite delay.
2. 2Slide your finger left and right on the strip under the table (or move the mouse, or use the arrow keys). The hollow ghost paddle is where your finger is.
3. 3The solid paddle arrives one ping later. At fibre it is on top of the ghost; at satellite it is over half a second behind. Send it where the ball will be, not where it is.
4. 4First to 7 beats the CPU. Clear all six rungs of the Ping Ladder, from LAN to satellite.
5. 5Duel: pass the phone. Each player picks a lag and plays the same eight serves against the same CPU mistakes. Most points wins.

What ping and jitter actually are

Ping is the time for a tiny message to travel from your device to a server and for the reply to come back — a round trip, measured in milliseconds. Jitter is how much that time varies from one message to the next. A speed test reports both, and this game uses both: the base delay is your ping and the paddle wanders within your jitter.

A game cannot hide the round trip. Your input has to reach the server before the server can tell you what happened, so the delay you feel is the full ping, not half of it. That is why the paddle here waits the whole number.

What is a good ping for gaming?

Under about 30 ms feels instant. That is typical of fibre to a server inside South Africa, and it is the LAN and Fibre rungs of the ladder. Between 30 and 60 ms — typical of 5G and fixed LTE — is comfortably playable in almost everything. Past 100 ms most people notice lag in fast games, and past 200 ms aiming and dodging become prediction rather than reaction.

Distance is the part you cannot buy your way out of. A server in Europe is roughly 160 ms away from South Africa on a good day whatever line you have, which is why the EU-server rung feels so different from fibre even though both may be 'fast' connections. Geostationary satellite adds about half a second of pure travel time before any equipment gets involved.

Real games cheat, in a good way

Online games hide most of this with client-side prediction: your character moves the instant you press, and the game quietly corrects if the server disagrees. Shooters add lag compensation, rewinding the world by your ping to judge a shot. Fighting games use rollback, guessing inputs and rewinding a few frames when wrong. Lag Pong deliberately does none of that, so what you feel is the worst case — the raw round trip.

The prediction marker is the one concession. Because the ball has no spin, its landing point can be predicted exactly, which is what makes the satellite rung a planning game rather than a lottery: at 600 ms you commit the paddle to where the ball will be, then wait.

Load-shedding and your ping

Fibre itself does not need power at your house beyond the small box on the wall and your router, so a modest UPS usually keeps a fibre line up and its ping low through a stage. Mobile networks have a harder time: more households fall back to mobile data at once, and some tower batteries run flat as the hours pass, so LTE and 5G ping often climb during the evening blocks. If your gaming ping is fine at lunchtime and awful at 20:00, that is the pattern to look for in your speed-test history.

The cheapest ping upgrade is a cable

Wi-Fi adds a few milliseconds at best and a lot of jitter at worst. Neighbours' routers, microwave ovens and a crowded 2.4 GHz band all add wobble that the game shows as the paddle drifting within its jitter range. A big download filling the router's queue — bufferbloat — can push ping from single digits to hundreds even on fibre. An Ethernet cable to the router removes the first problem; pausing the download removes the second.

About the numbers

The preset delays are typical figures for each technology, not measurements of any provider. Your real ping depends on your line, your router, the time of day and how far away the server is — which is why the Your ping chip reads your own speed-test result instead. The CPU has no lag, so its speed and aim are matched to the delay you chose and the ball is capped so it can never cross faster than your lag plus a human reaction; the screen says so. Nothing is tracked and nothing leaves your browser: records, the ladder and duel names live in localStorage on this device.

Frequently asked questions

Why does the paddle lag behind my finger?

Because that is what ping is. Your input is stored with a timestamp and the paddle is drawn where your finger was one ping ago, wandering within your jitter. The hollow ghost paddle shows where your finger actually is, so the gap between the two is your latency made visible.

Where does the 'Your ping' option get its number?

From the last speed test you ran on this site, stored only in your browser. Its ping becomes the delay and its jitter becomes the wobble. Run a test on the home page first and the chip appears.

Is it fair? The CPU has no lag.

The CPU's speed and aim are tuned down to match the delay you chose, and the ball is capped so it can never cross the table faster than your lag plus a human reaction. Every rung of the ladder is beatable; satellite is a planning game rather than a reaction game.

Do real online games feel this bad?

No — deliberately. Real games hide most of the round trip with client-side prediction, lag compensation and rollback. Lag Pong does none of that so you feel the raw number. What you feel at the LTE rung is roughly the worst case for a 45 ms line.

What is a good ping for gaming in South Africa?

Under about 30 ms feels instant and is typical of fibre to a local server. Between 30 and 60 ms is comfortably playable; past 100 ms most people notice lag in fast games. A server in Europe is roughly 160 ms away whatever your line, because of distance.