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Ping Test to United States (Northern Virginia)

More internet traffic passes through Ashburn, Virginia than through any other place on earth. The corridor west of Washington DC holds an extraordinary density of data centres, and it is the default home of "US East" for games, APIs and CDNs alike. This test measures your browser's round-trip time to that region, which is the number that governs how East Coast servers will feel for you.

Measuring 🇺🇸 Virginia

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READY

🇺🇸 Virginia

Measured alongside Virginia so you can tell distance apart from a bad route

OregonNorth America

São PauloSouth America

IrelandEurope

FrankfurtEurope

TokyoAsia

MumbaiAsia

Browsers cannot send ICMP packets, so this is the warm HTTPS round-trip time to the Virginia data-centre region — a close proxy for game ping, not a raw ping command.

What ping to Northern Virginia should you expect?

Typical browser round-trip times measured to the Virginia region. These are ranges, not promises — access technology and ISP routing move the number as much as distance does.

Testing from	Typical	Why
Washington DC / Baltimore	5–20 ms	Effectively on top of the data centres. Anything higher is local.
New York / Boston / Atlanta	15–40 ms	Short, heavily provisioned backbone routes along the eastern seaboard.
Chicago / Dallas	30–55 ms	Well-served central routes with plenty of path diversity.
US West Coast	60–95 ms	Coast to coast. This is why NA games run separate east and west pools.
United Kingdom / Ireland	75–110 ms	Transatlantic cables land nearby, so this is about as good as it gets.
Brazil	110–160 ms	North–south routes are less direct than the transatlantic ones.
India / SEA	200–280 ms	Halfway around the world; not viable for reaction-based games.

Why US East is the internet's default answer

Northern Virginia became a hub for historical reasons — early network exchanges, cheap power, and proximity to Washington — and the concentration compounded from there. Today it is where transatlantic cables terminate on the US side, where most major clouds put their largest region, and where the majority of American game servers for east-of-Mississippi players live. If a service only runs in one place, that place is usually here.

For players, that has a useful consequence: a US East result is a good proxy for how your connection performs on the wider internet, not just for games. If this number is healthy for your distance, most services will feel fine. If it is not, the issue is broad rather than game-specific.

Coast-to-coast, and what counts as normal

The continental United States is about 40 ms wide in round-trip terms once real routing is included, so a West Coast player hitting Virginia in the 60–90 ms band is doing fine. That is why NA games nearly always run at least two server pools — a single central location would leave one coast permanently disadvantaged.

Where results go wrong is usually the last mile rather than the backbone. Cable connections in North America can suffer badly from bufferbloat: the latency looks great when idle and collapses the moment anything uploads. If your figure jumps by a hundred milliseconds whenever a game updates in the background, that is bufferbloat, not distance, and it is fixable with smart queue management on the router.

How this measurement works

A browser cannot send the ICMP packets the ping command uses, or the UDP packets games use. Instead we open a connection to a real endpoint inside the Virginia data-centre region, warm it up so the TCP and TLS handshakes are not counted, then keep the best of several samples. The result is a genuine network round trip to Northern Virginia — usually a little higher than a raw ICMP ping, and a close, consistent proxy for the latency a game server in the same city would give you.

Northern Virginia ping FAQ

Is US East the same as "NA East" in games?

Usually, yes. Most publishers place their NA East pool in or near Ashburn, though a few use Chicago or New York instead. Those alternatives are close enough that your Virginia figure remains a good predictor — typically within 10 to 20 ms.

My ping is fine but the game still stutters. What is wrong?

That pattern almost always means packet loss or bufferbloat rather than latency. Loss makes the world state arrive incomplete while the ping counter stays low, and bufferbloat spikes your delay only when something else on the network is transmitting. Run this test while a large download is running — if the number explodes, you have found it.

Should West Coast players use US East servers?

For anything competitive, no. A 60 to 90 ms disadvantage against players sitting at 20 ms is significant in a shooter. For slower genres, strategy games or PvE content it is perfectly playable, and it is often worth it when the West Coast queue is empty.