Packet loss

How it is used

Reported in ping results and monitoring tools: '2% packet loss'. Engineers see, measure and investigate packet loss; typical causes are congestion, faulty cables, bad optics and wireless interference. Even 1% loss can make voice calls hard to follow.

Example sentences

1. We're seeing 5% packet loss on the link to Ankara, mostly in the evening.

2. The packet loss disappeared after we replaced the faulty patch cable.

Common collocations

• packet loss rate
• high packet loss
• see packet loss
• cause packet loss
• intermittent packet loss

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.
• jitterVariation in the delay of packets arriving over a network; when packets arrive at uneven intervals, voice and video calls become choppy or robotic.
• pingTo send a small test message to another device and wait for a reply, in order to check whether it can be reached and how long the round trip takes.
• congestionA situation in which more traffic is trying to cross a link or device than it can handle, so packets are queued or dropped and everything slows down.
• packetA small unit of data sent across a network, made of a header with addressing and control information and a payload that carries part of the actual content.

This word in other fields

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

• packet loss · Software Engineering

More terms: Bandwidth, Latency and Reliability

• bandwidth
• throughput
• QoS
• bottleneck
• round-trip time
• redundancy
• failover