What affects "ping"?

[#1]

My son is an online game player (it's not me, honest). He often reports getting "bad pings", whatever that is! I know what a ping is, so perhaps he is referring to the response time?
Anyway, is there anything I can do to impove this, and stop the ranting? 

[#2]

i cant play fifa at all coz of lag and plusnet throttleing me, my mate over the road on sky and his is fine.
Plusnet is the prob mate

[#3]

Lots of things effect ping times including the method used to measure them.
One commonly talked about method is to have interleaving removed from your broadband (if it's not already off)
Interleaving is usually placed on a line in an attempt to stabilise a noisy line.
Plusnet can be asked to place an order for interleaving to be turned off which usually takes about 12 hours.

[#4]

Quote from: Strat

Interleaving is usually placed on a line in an attempt to stabilise a noisy line.

How do I find out if my line is noisy before asking for the change?

[#5]

Do a quiet line test. On a standard wired telephone, preferably plugged in to the test socket, dial 17070 and choose option 2.

[#6]

Quote from: Jaggies

Do a quiet line test.

As broadband uses higher frequencies than voice you can't use the 17070 test to predict how much high frequency noise (or even how good the frequency response within each frequency band) there is in the path. The only realistic way to tell how good your line is is to plug a modem in and check the error statistics.

[#7]

[Empty - can't delete!]

[#8]

Quote from: MrC

As broadband uses higher frequencies than voice you can't use the 17070 test to predict how much high frequency noise (or even how good the frequency response within each frequency band) there is in the path...

That's what I thought!
My router reports the following, is this noisy enough to need interleave?

ADSL Status Mode   State        Up Speed    Down Speed    SNR Margin     Loop Att.
G.DMT              SHOWTIME     448000      8128000    10             24

[#9]

I don't think that is interleaved - putting interleaving on would increase latency (pings).
However you really need to find the number of errors being reported by the router. If that is high the retries may give the appearance of bad latency and putting interleaving on may improve things. If the error rate is low you definitely DON'T want interleaving on.
How does your son connect to the router, wired or wireless? If it's wireless you need to ask him to see if he has the same problems when using a wired connection.