Understanding Jitter

A cartoon of a blue square holding a question mark

Jitter is the amount of variation in latency. It’s measured in milliseconds. You can think of it as the time difference between each packet of data.

Packets should be sent over a network in a steady, continuous stream and with the packets evenly spaced. Imagine sending each page of a book to someone one page at a time. You want each page to get there in the right order and in a steady stream so the person at the other end can read the book without any problems. Sometimes packets can end up in a queue, delaying the steady stream of packets and disrupting the stability or your internet performance.

The lower your jitter the better (e.g., 5 ms is better than 10 ms).

If you are experiencing erratic internet performance and your jitter results are very high (in the region of 100 ms or higher) then you may wish to speak to your ISP to resolve the issue.

Note: You can export data to an excel sheet or as an image to share it with your ISP (internet service provider). Go to Analytics, select Create chart, then click Download CSV below the chart.

Jitter chart