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Got VoIP? Then Monitor These Key Network Metrics

How jitter, latency, and packet loss impact VoIP quality of service
Patrick Carey

Chances are you either have already or are contemplating replacing your old POTS/PBX telephone system with some flavor of Voice of IP (VoIP). With so many solutions available, you may even be thinking about going beyond a simple phone system replacement and upgrading to a rich unified communications suite, complete with real-time voice, video, screen sharing, and collaborative document editing.

The good news is that you don’t even need to have a seven-figure IT budget to get all these features. Pay-as-you-go SaaS offerings like Skype for Business, GoToMeeting, join.me, BlueJeans, WebEx and others have put unified communications in reach of every organization. But before you cut the phone cord you need to understand how your network performance (or lack thereof) can make or break your user experience and productivity with these tools.

Quality of Service Metrics for Unified Communications

We’ve all suffered through live meetings or VoIP calls where the audio and/or video was bad. A few extra seconds in a webpage load might go unnoticed but when audio and video is choppy, delayed, or has gaps, it can be excruciating.

To ensure Quality of Service (QoS) for VoIP and unified communications you need monitor and manage three basic network metrics:

Latency – how much time it takes for data packets to get from one designated point to another.

Jitter – the variation in in latency over time.

Packet Loss – the percentage of packets that never reach their intended destination.

Let’s take a quick look at the effects, root causes, and remediation techniques for each metric.

Latency

Ever been on a conference call with somebody in an adjacent office or cubicle? You end up hearing everything they say twice, first directly from them and (hopefully) through your headset or speakers a short time later. That’s latency. There’s always some, but when the round trip latency goes above about 250ms we start to notice it – awkward pauses and people talking over each other. Some latency is out of your control (e.g. for calls that traverse the internet), but you should aim for internal network latency levels of less than 150ms.

Latency problems are usually the result in packet handling and queuing delays; essentially packets get bogged down at your network nodes, either because the network is not configured to expedite delivery of VoIP/UC traffic or there is insufficient bandwidth.

Jitter

Most VoIP/UC solutions employ packet buffers to compensate for some amount of jitter, so it’s often not as easy to detect problems on calls. High jitter rates (i.e. large fluctuations in latency) will often result in dropped packets and gaps and audio/video transmission. In general, you want to have internal network jitter of less than 100ms. Jitter beyond that level will result in additional transmission delay (from the buffer processing) and potentially packet loss. Jitter is also often a sign of networks not configured to prioritize VoIP/UC packets.

Packet Loss

VoIP is highly susceptible to packet loss. Even a 1% packet loss will noticeably affect most real time protocol (RTP) codecs. VoIP/UC clients will recover the best they can but the user experience will be very poor, resulting in lost productivity, aborted calls, and sometimes headsets that are smashed to bits in a fit of rage.

Packet loss is often the a symptom of latency/jitter issues, but is often the result of network misconfigurations, insufficient bandwidth, or simply network equipment that is not up to the task of handling the increased demands of real time communication and collaboration.

Getting Ready for VoIP

To get ahead of these problems, you need to implement a monitoring and remediation plan early, ideally before you deploy these IP communications solution widely. This plan should include the following:

Baseline Testing and Ongoing Monitoring – You can’t fix what you don’t see. It’s a good idea to run some diagnostics/synthetic point-to-point tests within your network to measure baseline latency, jitter, and packet loss metrics so you can see how well your network is configured today. However, it’s also important that you continue to monitor these metrics as you scale your VoIP/UC deployment so you don’t get blindsided as users come online.

Network Configuration Improvements – Your existing network equipment may support higher VoIP QOS but require configuration changes to do so. Configuring to prioritize VoIP traffic will improve both latency and jitter. Bandwidth reservation, policy-based network management, Type of Service, Class of Service, and Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) are techniques generally used for prioritizing VoIP traffic.

Network Equipment Upgrades – It may be time to replace older and less capable network equipment. High quality VoIP routers will have a significant impact on these issues and are a must if you are using VoIP as a complete replacement to your legacy phone system. In addition you should consider upgrading your internet connection. You’ll be needing more speed and bandwidth going forward.

With a solid monitor, reconfigure, and upgrade plan in place your users will have fewer call problems and you’ll have few mangled headsets to replace.

Patrick Carey is VP Product Management & Marketing at Exoprise.

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Got VoIP? Then Monitor These Key Network Metrics

How jitter, latency, and packet loss impact VoIP quality of service
Patrick Carey

Chances are you either have already or are contemplating replacing your old POTS/PBX telephone system with some flavor of Voice of IP (VoIP). With so many solutions available, you may even be thinking about going beyond a simple phone system replacement and upgrading to a rich unified communications suite, complete with real-time voice, video, screen sharing, and collaborative document editing.

The good news is that you don’t even need to have a seven-figure IT budget to get all these features. Pay-as-you-go SaaS offerings like Skype for Business, GoToMeeting, join.me, BlueJeans, WebEx and others have put unified communications in reach of every organization. But before you cut the phone cord you need to understand how your network performance (or lack thereof) can make or break your user experience and productivity with these tools.

Quality of Service Metrics for Unified Communications

We’ve all suffered through live meetings or VoIP calls where the audio and/or video was bad. A few extra seconds in a webpage load might go unnoticed but when audio and video is choppy, delayed, or has gaps, it can be excruciating.

To ensure Quality of Service (QoS) for VoIP and unified communications you need monitor and manage three basic network metrics:

Latency – how much time it takes for data packets to get from one designated point to another.

Jitter – the variation in in latency over time.

Packet Loss – the percentage of packets that never reach their intended destination.

Let’s take a quick look at the effects, root causes, and remediation techniques for each metric.

Latency

Ever been on a conference call with somebody in an adjacent office or cubicle? You end up hearing everything they say twice, first directly from them and (hopefully) through your headset or speakers a short time later. That’s latency. There’s always some, but when the round trip latency goes above about 250ms we start to notice it – awkward pauses and people talking over each other. Some latency is out of your control (e.g. for calls that traverse the internet), but you should aim for internal network latency levels of less than 150ms.

Latency problems are usually the result in packet handling and queuing delays; essentially packets get bogged down at your network nodes, either because the network is not configured to expedite delivery of VoIP/UC traffic or there is insufficient bandwidth.

Jitter

Most VoIP/UC solutions employ packet buffers to compensate for some amount of jitter, so it’s often not as easy to detect problems on calls. High jitter rates (i.e. large fluctuations in latency) will often result in dropped packets and gaps and audio/video transmission. In general, you want to have internal network jitter of less than 100ms. Jitter beyond that level will result in additional transmission delay (from the buffer processing) and potentially packet loss. Jitter is also often a sign of networks not configured to prioritize VoIP/UC packets.

Packet Loss

VoIP is highly susceptible to packet loss. Even a 1% packet loss will noticeably affect most real time protocol (RTP) codecs. VoIP/UC clients will recover the best they can but the user experience will be very poor, resulting in lost productivity, aborted calls, and sometimes headsets that are smashed to bits in a fit of rage.

Packet loss is often the a symptom of latency/jitter issues, but is often the result of network misconfigurations, insufficient bandwidth, or simply network equipment that is not up to the task of handling the increased demands of real time communication and collaboration.

Getting Ready for VoIP

To get ahead of these problems, you need to implement a monitoring and remediation plan early, ideally before you deploy these IP communications solution widely. This plan should include the following:

Baseline Testing and Ongoing Monitoring – You can’t fix what you don’t see. It’s a good idea to run some diagnostics/synthetic point-to-point tests within your network to measure baseline latency, jitter, and packet loss metrics so you can see how well your network is configured today. However, it’s also important that you continue to monitor these metrics as you scale your VoIP/UC deployment so you don’t get blindsided as users come online.

Network Configuration Improvements – Your existing network equipment may support higher VoIP QOS but require configuration changes to do so. Configuring to prioritize VoIP traffic will improve both latency and jitter. Bandwidth reservation, policy-based network management, Type of Service, Class of Service, and Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) are techniques generally used for prioritizing VoIP traffic.

Network Equipment Upgrades – It may be time to replace older and less capable network equipment. High quality VoIP routers will have a significant impact on these issues and are a must if you are using VoIP as a complete replacement to your legacy phone system. In addition you should consider upgrading your internet connection. You’ll be needing more speed and bandwidth going forward.

With a solid monitor, reconfigure, and upgrade plan in place your users will have fewer call problems and you’ll have few mangled headsets to replace.

Patrick Carey is VP Product Management & Marketing at Exoprise.

The Latest

Zero-day vulnerabilities — security flaws that are exploited before developers even know they exist — pose one of the greatest risks to modern organizations. Recently, such vulnerabilities have been discovered in well-known VPN systems like Ivanti and Fortinet, highlighting just how outdated these legacy technologies have become in defending against fast-evolving cyber threats ... To protect digital assets and remote workers in today's environment, companies need more than patchwork solutions. They need architecture that is secure by design ...

Traditional observability requires users to leap across different platforms or tools for metrics, logs, or traces and related issues manually, which is very time-consuming, so as to reasonably ascertain the root cause. Observability 2.0 fixes this by unifying all telemetry data, logs, metrics, and traces into a single, context-rich pipeline that flows into one smart platform. But this is far from just having a bunch of additional data; this data is actionable, predictive, and tied to revenue realization ...

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Cloud computing has transformed how we build and scale software, but it has also quietly introduced one of the most persistent challenges in modern IT: cost visibility and control ... So why, after more than a decade of cloud adoption, are cloud costs still spiraling out of control? The answer lies not in tooling but in culture ...

CEOs are committed to advancing AI solutions across their organization even as they face challenges from accelerating technology adoption, according to the IBM CEO Study. The survey revealed that executive respondents expect the growth rate of AI investments to more than double in the next two years, and 61% confirm they are actively adopting AI agents today and preparing to implement them at scale ...

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A major architectural shift is underway across enterprise networks, according to a new global study from Cisco. As AI assistants, agents, and data-driven workloads reshape how work gets done, they're creating faster, more dynamic, more latency-sensitive, and more complex network traffic. Combined with the ubiquity of connected devices, 24/7 uptime demands, and intensifying security threats, these shifts are driving infrastructure to adapt and evolve ...

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The development of banking apps was supposed to provide users with convenience, control and piece of mind. However, for thousands of Halifax customers recently, a major mobile outage caused the exact opposite, leaving customers unable to check balances, or pay bills, sparking widespread frustration. This wasn't an isolated incident ... So why are these failures still happening? ...

Cyber threats are growing more sophisticated every day, and at their forefront are zero-day vulnerabilities. These elusive security gaps are exploited before a fix becomes available, making them among the most dangerous threats in today's digital landscape ... This guide will explore what these vulnerabilities are, how they work, why they pose such a significant threat, and how modern organizations can stay protected ...

The prevention of data center outages continues to be a strategic priority for data center owners and operators. Infrastructure equipment has improved, but the complexity of modern architectures and evolving external threats presents new risks that operators must actively manage, according to the Data Center Outage Analysis 2025 from Uptime Institute ...

As observability engineers, we navigate a sea of telemetry daily. We instrument our applications, configure collectors, and build dashboards, all in pursuit of understanding our complex distributed systems. Yet, amidst this flood of data, a critical question often remains unspoken, or at best, answered by gut feeling: "Is our telemetry actually good?" ... We're inviting you to participate in shaping a foundational element for better observability: the Instrumentation Score ...