4 reasons network jitter might be silently causing you internet problems
Jitter is a lesser-known networking issue that I can guarantee that most of you have experienced, probably recently. It’s most apparent in any type of real-time communications, like video calls, VoIP systems, livestreaming, and in-game comms, but can also affect video and audio streaming from services like Spotify or YouTube.
You might go weeks without seeing its effects on your communications, but when it strikes, it’s one of the most annoying problems. If you’ve noticed gaps or reverb on calls, static, echoing audio, or distortion of audio or video, jitter is likely at play. And even worse, it could be caused by a multitude of problems, from network congestion to your Wi-Fi network or the VoIP or video communications platform you’re using.
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It can ruin your online gaming experience
Nothing shuts down a competitive game like inconsistent ping times
Online games are sensitive to the effects of many networking issues, from ping times to latency, and jitter makes any existing issues even more pronounced. We’ve all had moments where we thought we got that headshot, only to miss and get taken out ourselves by a rubberbanding enemy player. Or those players on our team’s voice comms that turn into robots, distorted beyond all recognition as if they’re being dragged into The Matrix.
- Ping: Delay between you and the game server
- Jitter: The inconsistency of the delay
Those are all clear signs of jitter, which, in the case of online gaming, works like a variable latency value that gets added or subtracted from your existing ping. We all know ping is the delay between our game client and the game server, but when jitter is at play also, it means you have an inconsistent amount of delay. That puts you at a significant disadvantage in fast-paced games like Counter-Strike 2 or DOTA 2, where every millisecond can be the decider between victory and defeat.
Anything under 20 milliseconds is considered exceptional for jitter when playing online games. It’s only really once you get past 50ms of jitter that it starts to negatively impact your gaming experience and anything past 100ms can make your game unplayable.
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Modern work life is spent on video calls
Stuttery, freezing video calls with poor audio are often a sign of jitter
While we might not always like being on camera, nobody can doubt the transformation that video conferencing has wrought on how we work. Hybrid or WFH arrangements mean we spend hours on video calls daily, and we all want to look and sound our best during those calls.
When jitter strikes, it’s hard to stay connected, let alone at our best. Video streams could go pixelated, get stuck buffering, or distort in other ways. The audio could stutter, echo, or distort in other ways. It could be your network, but it’s just as likely the video conferencing tool has issues, and as it doesn’t affect everyone on the call equally, it’s a difficult issue to troubleshoot. You could try turning your video feed off when experiencing these glitches, as that gives more room for the audio stream on the call and might be the difference between finishing the call or having to reschedule.
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Jitter ruins audio streaming too
Glitching or stuttering music streaming is often due to jitter
Jitter has been an issue for digital audio since the CD format first arrived in 1982. Whether streamed from a local digital source, your media server, or the Internet, all digital audio options suffer from jitter to some extent. What’s interesting is that the network jitter is less of an issue for audio playback than the jitter introduced by master clock issues, CD servo motors, or even the spacing between the pits on a CD.
That makes audio streaming services less affected by jitter, but overloading the network with other data transmission can still cause audio glitches. Wi-Fi interference in wireless streaming or speaker setups like Sonos or Chromecast can also cause jitter, making the audio signal drop out, echo, or go robotic, as in a video conference call. It’s mitigated by error correction and buffering, but things like bufferbloat can overload those protections, so jitter is still an issue, just a much lesser one than you might have been led to believe.
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Livestreamers rely on consistent internet for their livelihood
Imagine being on a never-ending video call to earn a living
Jitter can be bad enough when you’ve got one thing using your internet connection, but livestreamers are usually sending data to the livestreaming platform at the same time as sending and receiving data from any number of other internet sources, which could be game servers, communication tools like TeamSpeak or Discord, or video calls to other streamers.
While traditional network streaming sources like YouTube are bandwidth-dependent and use buffers to limit the effects of jitter and other network issues, livestreaming needs low latency connections for optimal results. It’s interactive but, more importantly, bidirectional, making any jitter issues compound as they happen in two directions or more. There could be jitter to the servers for the game being played, jitter to the platform, and jitter back to the streamer from delayed responses in the chat.
You can’t quite rule it out, because the platform and your ISP’s hardware are out of your control, but it’s possible to limit the effects in the same way you would for any other service affected by jitter. That’s using wired networking, upgrading your router to one with more powerful processing and that can use SQM and QoS, and reducing the number of other things using your network at the same time.
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If you’ve got a decent internet connection but still experience issues with streaming voice or video, jitter might be at play
Jitter is one of the networking issues that is often overlooked, as it’s not mentioned by many of the tools used to diagnose connections. The list of ways to mitigate or fix jitter is fairly long, and it’s not always clear which change fixes the issue once it’s gone. Some things you can try to fix jitter include enabling Quality-of-Service or SQM in your router, using wired connections instead of wireless, upgrading to a better router, and monitoring your home network to see what could be causing the issue. If you can’t see anything in your home network, it’s time to talk to your ISP so that they can do some investigating on their end.
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