

High latency in network connections corresponds directly to a drop in throughput. As you might expect, one-way latency measures the amount of time it takes for a packet to travel from one endpoint to another, while round-trip latency also includes the time it takes for the initial sender to receive a response. Latency can refer to either one-way or round-trip latency. Latency and jitter are related-but not always correlated-measures of network performance.


However, they can be especially problematic for traffic that depends on real-time communication, such as video streaming or Voice over IP (VoIP), for which high levels of jitter can lead to choppy video or audio. Packets transmitted in constant intervals (top) and those same packets as received with jitter (bottom)įor most network traffic, these inconsistencies in packet interarrival time don't significantly affect the conversation.
