Jitter is a common and frustrating issue that can dramatically affect the quality of your phone or video calls. Similar to latency, it refers to variations in the delay of packets being received. According to Cisco’s research, excessive jitter, surpassing 40 milliseconds (ms) will profoundly undermine your call quality. Ideally, they recommend maintaining it below 30ms where possible.
Consider a phone call: the audio is converted into digital bits (1’s and 0’s) before traversing a network from the call’s origin to its intended destination. Once received, these packets are converted back to an analog frequency which the listener at the other end can hear. In an ideal world, these packets would arrive uniformly and sequentially. However, there are times when due to network issues, the packets arrive at irregular intervals, leading to jitter. While this doesn’t mean you are suffering from packet loss, the ultimate result is very similar.
Impact of Jitter
Jitter not only introduces inconsistencies on your network but it also affects the experience of both your agents and customers. Before delving into methods to mitigate it, it’s important to understand the impact on your communications.
1. Degraded real-time application quality: Jitter adversely affects real-time applications such as voice over IP (VoIP) and video conferencing. This is because of irregular packet arrival, which results in distorted audio or video streams. This leads to disruptions, delays, and overall poor call quality.
2. Disrupted transmission of data: Jitter disrupts the sequence of packets during data transmission, requiring reordering at the receiving end. This reordering process consumes resources and time, ultimately affecting the speed and overall throughput of data transmission.
3. Reduced user experience: In scenarios where network reliability is crucial, such as online gaming or live streaming, even minute variations in packet arrival times can significantly impact the user experience. For example, jitter disrupts smooth gameplay due to buffering and lags in video, frustrating gamers and affecting levels of engagement.
4. Aggravation of network congestion: Jitter can exacerbate any existing network congestion issues. When combined with already high network traffic, it contributes to increased packet loss and latency. This further impedes the efficient transfer of data.
5. Lower quality of service (QoS): In enterprise environments, especially for businesses reliant on cloud-based applications or remote services, jitter can significantly diminish the QoS. The unpredictable delays it introduces impact on service reliability and consistency. Consequently, this affects productivity and may result in dissatisfied customers who might opt to switch to a competitor’s service or, worse yet, spread negative feedback about your business within their social circles.
How to Reduce and Mitigate Jitter
Minimizing jitter is key to achieving smoother data flow, enhancing user experience, and fostering overall network stability and reliability. To achieve this goal, consider implementing the following techniques:
1. QoS implementation: Prioritize your traffic by implementing QoS mechanisms. Through these, you can allocate bandwidth appropriately, prioritizing real-time applications such as VoIP or video streaming. QoS policies ensure that critical data packets receive preferential treatment, reducing the chances of these applications being affected by jitter.
2. Network traffic management: You can better manage your network congestion by leveraging traffic shaping techniques. These control the flow of data to prevent packet loss and avoid excessive variations in packet arrival times.
4. Network redundancy and connection reliability: Enhance connectivity reliability by deploying redundant network paths and equipment. Redundancy plays a vital role in minimizing the impact of sudden network disruptions and reducing jitter that arises from unstable connections.
5. Infrastructure upgrades: Invest in high-quality network equipment and infrastructure that is capable of handling increased data volumes without causing delays or interruptions. By simply upgrading your switches, routers, and cabling, you can easily improve your network performance and as a result, reduce jitter.
6. Jitter buffers: Implement jitter buffers in your real-time applications to smooth out variations in the arrival of packets. These buffers can temporarily store and organize incoming packets, reducing the impact of jitter on your voice and video communications.
7. Monitoring solutions: Utilize network monitoring and analysis tools to identify and diagnose sources of jitter on your networks. Continuous monitoring helps to detect patterns and understand the root causes. This allows you to introduce proactive measures to mitigate its effects.
The Need to Monitor Your Network
Automated and continuous monitoring solutions such as Cyara are indispensable for effectively understanding, reducing, and mitigating jitter in your networks. These solutions provide real-time visibility into your network performance, allowing for immediate detection of jitter-related anomalies or fluctuations.
Through continuous monitoring, your team can proactively identify patterns or trends that might be contributing to it, allowing for more timely interventions. Automated monitoring tools not only streamline the process of identifying this jitter but also provide detailed analytics and historical data, which aids in more prompt root cause analysis.
Additionally, ongoing monitoring solutions facilitate the implementation of preventive measures by offering comprehensive insights into network behavior, enabling adjustments, optimizations, and the fine-tuning of network configurations to mitigate jitter and sustain consistent network performance over time. For more information on how to overcome jitter or any other communication challenges you may be facing, please contact us here.
