Test Results

Meaning Of Speed/Quality Test Results

Jitter: Data is supposed to be sent and received at steady intervals. Jitter is the measurement of how much later (or sooner in the case of negative numbers, -13ms) an expected packet of data was sent or received.

Imagine, for example, having a conversation with a colleague where the amount of time between each word varied between one second and thirty seconds. Such a conversation would be hard to understand because you would give up waiting for the next word to be spoken.

Excessive jitter indicates there is a great deal of instability in the rate at which you send/receive information.

Packet Loss: This is a measurement of what percentage of packets (information) sent never made it to their destination.

This is the electronic equivalent of mailing a letter that gets lost en route to the destination. Browsing the web and sending email are activities that are not time dependant and thus compensate for packet loss by waiting for the lost data to be present. But with streaming media services, such as voice over internet phone calls, there is no way to pause the activity in order to resend the information.