ping tells you the latency of a site - well it does if you average over loads of them. That means the time it takes to get a packet of data to the host and back again. This has got more to do with the number of Cisco products betwen you and them than the likes of the bandwidth.
The other important factor is the effective raw bandwidth. There are tools to meaure this (some web based) between two given points for a test (but reasonably sizable) download. The famous one is 'bing' which comes with most Linux distros. You just give the address of each end of the connection and it tells you the bandwidth between them.
http://fgouget.free.fr/bing/index-en.shtml
For example this is the result of a bing between my local machine and one over the other side of the campus (a respectable 2Mb/sec):
average statistics (experimental) :
packet loss: small 0%, big 0%, total 0%
warning: rtt big host1 0.035ms < rtt small host2 0.036ms
average throughput 2072874bps
average delay per packet 0.296ms (1401 bits)
weighted average throughput 2072770bps
between two machines on the same segment (much faster):
average statistics (experimental) :
packet loss: small 0%, big 0%, total 0%
warning: rtt big host1 0.035ms < rtt small host2 0.036ms
average throughput 13653333bps
average delay per packet 0.735ms (5661 bits)
weighted average throughput 13649979bps