[Cordance]

Wall of text about pings and internet speeds incoming you may be interested. Mostly general information some things are not common knowledge though. Not directly useful to pig as his state question but might help longer term.

+ [ what is pinging] +

When you ping something you get the time and number of hops your data takes from point A you to point B destination. Getting a low ping is all about where your packets go not really where they start. A customer based company will try to tweak things to make your ping quicker on your request. A company that doesnt care as much does not tweak for personal taste but will go with what works best for the most. Which is generally why Teltras pings are not that great to not mass trafficked areas of the internet.

Just to put in short about cable infrastructure you are wrong Benji. Most is owned by Testra and rented however some is not. Almost all data will at some point run along Testra cables of some kind though so you are kind of right. Also on ping you are actually going from Data center to data center. So it depends which companies have which deal with which data centers to who can get you the best connection.

+ [Net neutrality] +

Now to quickly touch on net neutrality before other people do yes all data centers can and will receive and reboardcast anyone's data thats how things are set up however some data centers become bottle necks this is why firm routing rules for company are normally in place to speed things along.

The cable plays a roll in bandwidth useable it doesnt really play a huge roll in speed because the majority of the slow time is actually computers reviving and re broad casting information. The amount not the speed of the connect is limited by the cable the speed is set by distance which is error correction related.

+ [Getting a ping that is better than you should.] +

There are a few exceptions to the rule it is possible to use what is known as packet tunneling to try to skip hops aka speed things up or hard force a route you know is quicker than other. This practice is frowned on by companies like blizzard because you actually alter the packets being sent from your computer. However some companies internode is an example I know of had routers set up to detect packets going to places and tunneled them which is different because its is once the data is sent aka no alteration other than normal packet movement only effectively building a software shortcut though their own network. This was done with world of warcraft in mind not sure about starcraft servers.

When you ping you get to see IP addresses, almost all data centers are traceable as to their location in the world if you see a packet going "the wrong way" it means one of three things. There is a break in a smooth connection aka IT in a data center are having several heart attacks at once well trying to frantically fix a problem. Two your company's routing rules suck, or three your company spends a lot of time effort and energy to actually work out the quickest way not just the easiest way.
Interesting fact trying to block youtube from their people Pakistan crashed the internet for I believe it was 2008 for 1 hour due to a routing rule causing a dead location to appear to be the fastest connection in the world. Convincing all traffic to try to use this shortcut.

So summery look where your data is going if you really want to understand the alterations in ping speeds from day to day. This is why different companies have different ping rates to different places.

In answer to Benji's curiosity about ADSL speeds vs cable. ADSL should not change speeds. Where it is in cable's design (for your benefit).

+ [ explanation of speed changes] +

ADSL works on your phone line so it has one connection per house to the exchange where it then feeds into the masses which should be able to handle any ADSL connections because the amount of unused bandwidth from exchange to exchange is huge compared to the number of ADSL connections you can fit in the exchange or the total bandwidth of the total of connections possible.
Cable is designed with a system of sharing of bandwidth. If no one else is using it you get all the bandwidth in the cable meant to run the whole street, super fast. As soon as someone else starts using you are forced to make room for them etc etc. So lots of people slows down cable from max speed. This being said cable slow speeds are normally as quick as good ADSL speeds. This is due to the quality of cable used being more error free so greater useable bandwidth.

Some companies offer personal tweaks you can make to your connection.

+ [Does your company offer profiles] +

I can speak for internode I can not speak for others because I havent used them but I suspect iinet would also have this. They call it profiles with internode the basic idea is depending on how stable your connection is you need more or less error checking. You can turn down the error checking to increase the speed. This is only from you to your ISP. You can also change its nature a common form called Annex M gives you a higher upload but slightly slower download. Using myself as an example I am on the quickest Annex M setup offered I have a very stable connection so I have put it to the most risky setting. This gives me roughly a 15mbs down and 1.1mbs up. If I change it to the non Annex M set up I get around 17mbs down and 0.8 up. Changes from day to day.

+ [When does MY IP address matter to speed] +

What is your IP address might your company have a better one. This one is a little wishy washy but sometimes useable when you have those really bad connections. ADSL connects to the exchange then through the power of science connects from there to the data center each time you make a connection (aka sink your modem to the internet) you do so with an IP address if you dont have a static one(which in Australia you need to ask for likely to be changing with NBN but I havent looked at it too much yet) when ever you turn off your modem and reconnect you might get a different one. Not all IP address create set ping pathways between you and your ISP sometimes you get a crappy one. This is due to the data center capacity to save on money many data centers dont have enough room to give everyone everything at max speed at the same time. If you happen to be next to a whole lot of people who are all using a lot of bandwidth its for want of a better way to explain noisy. If you can get to a quieter area of their network you will have a better time of your requests being heard Reset your modem can help this.