Jitter

How it is used

Measured in milliseconds and watched closely for VoIP and video. Engineers measure, reduce and smooth out jitter, often with QoS and jitter buffers. As a rough guide, many voice systems aim to keep jitter below about 30 ms.

Example sentences

1. Latency is fine, but jitter on the branch link is making the audio sound robotic.

2. After we enabled QoS, jitter dropped from 45 ms to under 10 ms.

Common collocations

• high jitter
• jitter buffer
• measure jitter
• latency and jitter

Related terms

• latencyThe time it takes for data to travel from one point of a network to another, usually measured in milliseconds; lower latency means a faster response.
• packet lossA situation in which some packets sent across a network never reach their destination, usually shown as a percentage; it causes slow downloads, choppy calls and frozen video.
• QoSShort for quality of service: a set of techniques that give important traffic, such as voice and video, priority over less urgent traffic when a link is busy.
• UDPShort for User Datagram Protocol: a simple, fast protocol that sends data without setting up a connection and without checking whether it arrived; used for voice, video, DNS and gaming.
• round-trip timeThe time it takes for a packet to travel from a source to a destination and for the reply to come back, usually shown in milliseconds; ping reports this value.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

• jitter · Software Engineering

More terms: Bandwidth, Latency and Reliability

• bandwidth
• throughput
• bottleneck
• congestion
• redundancy
• failover