you can disabled it without it having any adverse affects on your connectivity, I have done it on my router. All it does it stop people from being able to ping you which can prevent DOS attacks. All it will mean though is that if anyone tries to ping you to assess your connectivity it will look like your connection is down. Like if you think you are having problems and ping
www.google.com to test your connection, if it comes back as destination unreachable or a timeout, you would think you had problems but it might just mean that google are blocking icmp echo requests. This is what people would get if they tried to ping you.