You don’t want your prospective clients to have difficulty understanding your sales conversation. It is vital that you get the right data at the right time to have the intended quality experience. A lost packet can’t be re-sent when it’s needed this instant. The key difference is the real-time element of access. VOIP and other real-time internet activities demand almost no jitter. If you are doing VOIP (Voice over IP), screen sharing, HD video streaming, or online gaming, Jitter can cause a severe drop in the quality of the signal. Ultimately, it depends on how you’re using your connection. Other uses require greater data transmission fidelity. For example, when you’re downloading a PDF, or reading a static text document online. Sometimes it doesn’t matter how bad your jitter is. You want to have as little Jitter as possible. Higher jitter values represent more variance between the successive pings. With a good Internet connection, and assuming a normally functioning computer and server connection, a ping usually takes about 40 milliseconds. Lightning takes about 150 to 200 milliseconds to complete its electricity discharge. Note that there are one thousand milliseconds in one second. Then notice the round trip time in milliseconds, and if there was any packet loss. On my computer, this sends 32 bytes of data to whatever IP address comes up for Google in the DNS ( Domain Naming System). This may take longer if you’re experiencing packet loss. The result of the ping will display as soon as it’s done. Type in “ping ” without the quotes and hit enter. Hit the Windows Key + R, type cmd.exe and hit enter. Go ahead, it won’t break your computer (as long as you follow my instructions to a T). You can do this from your command prompt. A Ping is a test where packets (segments of data) are sent to a server. In other words, it is the time between when your router sends a request and when you get a response. According to Ookla, it is the reaction time of your connection. To my and maybe your surprise, it turns out that speed is not the only important metric.Įven if you did, a refresher never hurts. Like many people, I used to think that download speed was the go-to metric to judge the quality of my ISP (Internet Service Provider). Part of productivity is having a clean work environment and a fast and reliable internet connection Speed is What It’s All About… Or Is It?

Ookla packet loss