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Some better explanation:

The default tickrate (20 for internet servers) is what causes the horrible ping in stat net display - when the server runs at 20 ticks a second, that also means it can take up to 1/20th of a second before it can acknowledge a ping from a client - that means 50 ms! This also affects gameplay - having a server run at tickrate 20 means that player commands have to wait for 50 ms in worst case before they can actually affect gameplay. And aiming becomes less accurate - just think of playing with 20 fps. If you move your mouse fast, there are large "jumps" in your viewrotation at these low values, and that is exactly what the server will do with your aiming if it is running at such a low tickrate, causing "gaps" in your aiming movement. This is also the cause for the seemingly increasing damage for the continously firing weapons (pulse secondary and minigun) - aiming just gets more precise, causing more of the actually single shots to hit the target.

In the past, server admins seem to have discovered that at a large scale. However, some of them went too far when fixing that misconfigured default setting - you can find servers running at tickrate 100 out there. Now while that is fine for people with a lot of bandwidth (as long as the server cpu and network connection is capable to sustain it), it is NOT fine for the average ISDN player.

The server->client traffic increases nearly at the same rate as the tickrate does, and tickrates of 100 generate too much traffic for a 64 kbit isdn line. That results in either packet loss (if maxclientrate on server is high enough and netspeed of the client is set to more than the line can actually handle to increase fps rates - see above for that..) or in the client missing game information ranging from decals to really important stuff like player movement.

On a sidenote - the reason for "f1-ping" being higher than stat net ping is simple: most clients will run at more fps than the server. That means the server will get an acknowledge to a ping request faster than the client will get it from the server - he just has to wait 1/fps seconds (plus the actual icmp ping, of course). For some strange reason (probably an attempt to filter out those dependencies) the client substracts half its frame-time (1/fps) from its own ping - that is why you'll always see a lower ping on your own machine than others will see for you.