

High jitter, or high variation in delivery time, results in choppy voice calls or glitchy-sounding looking video quality for businesses using cloud-based phone systems. Jitter is the variation in packet / information arrival time. High latency can also impact businesses who use instant messaging or rely on data-intensive applications such as those in the financial and medical industries. This is why gamers are in particular watchful of high lag connections. In video streaming and conferencing, videos move slowly or take long times to buffer. Words and phrases may overlap, causing users start talking over one another unintentionally.

High latency causes the timing of VoIP conversations to be off. High latency is oftentimes referred to as lag. Latency is the measure of time it takes for information to be encoded and delivered to the intended destination. This is caused by the speed and success information packets are transferred between the video source and your device. You’ve probably seen when video quality suddenly becomes pixelated or stops altogether. Similar to VoIP, video streaming is negatively affected by poor connection quality in the form of high packet loss, latency, and jitter. Poor quality bandwidth will result in low call quality, lag, choppy conversations, overlapping conversations, and dropped calls. Quality metrics like latency, jitter, and packet loss measure the accuracy, completeness and success of information being sent and received over your connection. The quality of your connection and the speed at which information can be exchanged is also critical since VoIP service and other applications that run over your broadband connection need to be delivered accurately and in real-time for good performance. Having enough bandwidth isn’t the only thing to consider in a VoIP quality test. Learn More About Internet Testing Internet Quality & VoIP
