craigb
Nice, but is that wireless from over 45 feet away from the router James? 
The only ping that will be at all affected by the distance from your computer to the router will be to ping the router itself. That should only take a negligible period if you were miles away. Open a command prompt and type "ping [your router address, typically 192.168.0.1]" Ping will only report < 1ms, but again that has nothing to do with the distance. The travel time for a signal in copper is astonishingly fast, and fiberoptic even faster compared to the processing time in intermediate hosts. That speed is the rate of transmission of the electrical wave in copper, approximately 2/3 the speed of light (or ~200,000 meters/sec), and is orders of magnitude faster than an electron will travel through the wire. Light in fiber optic cable travels about 200 million meters/second. The speed of transmission in a wireless signal approaches the speed of light in air or close to 300 million meters/second.
The ping you are getting with a speed test is the travel time to and from the server that is hosting the speed test over the internet. The most important factor there is the number of hops required to get to that distant server and back. Every computer along the path has to process the data that is the ping and forward it on, and that is the source of the delay. There may also be dumb repeaters along the way that act like fast processors, but nontheless introduce delays orders of magnitudes greater than the signal speed.
In a wireless router transmission, the protocol will require that any errors be re-sent. To the extent that a weak signal may be related to distance in a noisy or obstructed environment, and to multiple data transmission errors and re-sends there may be a measurable difference. But if you have a good signal the distance is irrelevant.