> The NET indicator is displayed when a client has not received any packets from the server in the last 300ms. This was likely aimed at players to help them determine how bad their ping was.
This is not an indicator of high ping. It's an indication of loss of connectivity. Even if your ping is 2 seconds, the server should be sending you updates regularly. If you haven't received anything in 300 ms, either you're losing lots of packets or you have some epic buffering somewhere.
You're assuming a consistent connection - if your ping is 2 seconds, it's unlikely you're receiving each packet precisely 1 second late - much more likely the delay will be variable over time, probably not normally as high as +/-15% to cause 300ms gaps, but certainly possible.
But as long as you keep receiving traffic in a 300 ms period, the indicator wouldn't show. I've used radio internet with 1+ second ping, and while laggy, the jitter was surprisingly uniform.
When Quake(world) was released, it was common to play games on dial-up modems, where 250+ milliseconds was a normal ping time. If you played on a distant server, you could easily get over 500 milliseconds or even much worse.
Funny, my first cable connection was waaay worse than dailup. Abysmal pings and speeds maxing out around 3kb/sec. It took a few years to reach 32kb/sec which felt insane.
This is not an indicator of high ping. It's an indication of loss of connectivity. Even if your ping is 2 seconds, the server should be sending you updates regularly. If you haven't received anything in 300 ms, either you're losing lots of packets or you have some epic buffering somewhere.