Ping time has no relation to the speed at which files are download.

Ping is only a measure of the time a message takes to get from here to there. It does not measure bandwidth in any way shape or form.

Ping is important for online realtime games. It has no relevance whatsoever for the gnutella network.

While some people do lie about their connection type - the reason a download from a T1 or T3 is likely to be slow is that everyman and his dogs are trying to download from these connections. So the T1 may have a huge bandwidth - but by the time you are sharing it with a couple of hundred other people, your slice of that bandwidth is fairly small.

There is no easy way to measure the bandwidth of a remote computer unless you have exclusive access to the computer - this isn't practical on gnutella.

Mark