Jitter Test
Jitter is the variation in your ping over time. High jitter causes choppy calls and lag spikes even when average ping looks fine. Press GO to measure yours.
Under 5 ms — Excellent
Your connection is highly consistent. Suitable for competitive gaming and professional video calls.
5–15 ms — Good
Normal for most broadband connections. Video calls and gaming work well at this level.
15–30 ms — Moderate
Slight stuttering may appear in voice calls or occasional lag spikes in games.
Above 30 ms — High
Noticeably choppy calls, rubber-banding in games. Likely caused by Wi-Fi or ISP congestion.
What is jitter?
Jitter is the variation in your ping samples over time. If your connection sends packets with round-trip times of 18, 20, 19, 22, and 21 ms, jitter is near zero. If those same five packets return in 10, 40, 8, 55, and 27 ms, jitter is very high — even though the average ping might look acceptable.
This is why jitter matters more than raw ping for real-time applications: a 30 ms average ping with 2 ms jitter is far better than a 15 ms average ping with 40 ms jitter. Deep-dive on what jitter is →
How jitter is measured here
This test sends 20 lightweight requests to the nearest test server, records each round-trip time, trims the best and worst outliers, then calculates jitter as the mean of successive differences between samples. See the full methodology →
What causes high jitter?
- Wi-Fi interference — the most common cause; radio channel congestion makes individual packet timings unpredictable
- ISP congestion — peak-hour overloading varies the queue depth at each router hop
- Buffer bloat — routers with large buffers that fill during heavy use add inconsistent queueing delay
- VPN overhead — encryption processing time varies, adding timing inconsistency
- Packet loss — retransmitted packets arrive much later, spiking jitter
How to reduce jitter
- Switch to wired Ethernet — eliminates Wi-Fi interference entirely
- Restart your router — clears buffer queues
- Reduce background bandwidth usage during calls or games
- Test at off-peak hours to identify ISP congestion as a cause
- Upgrade to a router with QoS or buffer bloat mitigation
For more detail, see our Wi-Fi improvement guide or our slow internet troubleshooting guide.