Understanding Latency and Packet Loss

A cartoon of a digital chart with arms and legs

When your data is sent over a network, it is broken down into little “packets”. Latency is the total amount of time it takes for a packet of data to travel from your computer to the test server and back to your computer. The lower the latency the better.

Packet loss is the number of packets sent over a network that were unsuccessful reaching their destination. It is like sending over a document composed of several pages one page at a time. If you don’t receive all the pages, you won’t understand the content of the document.

High packet loss impacts media services and online gaming applications. For most use cases, packet loss above 2% is noticeable by users. If your latency and/or your packet loss are high, we advise you to inform your ISP.

Note: You can export data to an excel sheet or as an image to share it with your ISP. Go to Analytics, select Create chart, then Download CSV.

Latency chart