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Let’s say you do a speed test and your internet looks super fast—but you still have a hard time streaming a TV show or playing an online game. Well, there could be a number of problems, including low latency, jitter, and packet loss. In this post, we’re going to go over packet loss: what it is, how to test for it, and what you can do about it.
What Is Packet Loss?
The data coming to your device over the internet is subdivided into little groups called packets. If you’re watching a show on Netflix, Netflix doesn’t just send you one big file all at once. You actually get thousands of packets of data. Each packet contains a bit of the data along with information about where it’s coming from, where it’s going, and some security information about who can look at the data.
Imagine sending a big jigsaw puzzle to a friend, except instead of sending it all at once, you send all the pieces separately in little packets. That’s sort of how transmitting data over the internet works. Now imagine a small handful of those packets get lost. That’s basically what packet loss is—a little bit of the data you were supposed to receive gets lost.
If you’re in the middle of FaceTiming a friend, packet loss can look like a brief timeout. If you’re streaming video or audio, you might see or hear gaps in your playback. If you’re loading a web page, parts may not load correctly. If you’re playing a game, you may see degraded quality. If your packet loss gets bad enough, whatever application you’re trying to run might stop altogether.
Quick Recap: Latency and Jitter
Sometimes, what looks like packet loss might just be latency or jitter. We’ve done a whole post on latency and jitter, and you should certainly check it out. But as a quick recap: jitter is when there are delays in the transition of packets. Latency is the amount of delays in those packages. Both are bad, but neither are packet loss. You can have bad jitter or latency with no packet loss; the packets are getting there late, but they are getting there. But with packet loss, a certain percentage aren’t getting there at all.
Returning to our puzzle analogy, with poor latency or bad jitter, your friend might get some of those puzzle pieces in the mail a week late leading to some frustration, but they end up with a completed puzzle. With packet loss, you’re left with an incomplete puzzle.
When Packet Loss Doesn’t Matter
Some applications will resend packets that are lost. For example, if you’re downloading a big game file (say, 60 GB) over the PlayStation network and a small handful of packets gets lost (say, 50 MB worth), PlayStation will just resend them and you probably won’t notice.
However, some applications can’t resend packets. For example, if you’re on a live video chat, the chat won’t resend lost packets. You’ll just see a gap in your playback.
How Do I Measure Packet Loss?
If you use this simple speed test tool from CloudFlare, you’ll note a field that says packet loss. This is the easiest way of measuring.
How Do I Fix Packet Loss?
The fix for packet loss will depend on the cause, but let’s go over all the things you can do.
Update Your Software: Update all your devices, including the firmware on your router, to make sure you’re performing at peak efficiency. Old software can slow things down.
Update Your Hardware: It could be that you’re losing packets when they get to your local network because your old router can’t handle connecting to 18 devices simultaneously. Check to see if the router you’re using supports Wi-Fi 6, even if you’re connecting to it via Ethernet cable.
Upgrade Your Bandwidth: While people use bandwidth and speed interchangeably, they technically aren’t the same. When it comes to packet loss, the difference sort of matters. If you have multiple people and/or multiple devices all trying to do bandwidth-heavy stuff at the same time, you just might need more bandwidth.
There’s an easy way to see if this is your problem. Test your packet loss at a time of high traffic; say, when your kid is playing an online game and your partner is watching Lord of the Rings. Then test your packet loss when you’re certain no one is really using much bandwidth—say, early in the morning. If you’re getting no packet loss early in the morning but lots when others are using a lot of bandwidth, then you may just need to upgrade to more bandwidth. Try fibre?
