If you’ve experienced lag while gaming, video calling, or streaming—even on a fast connection—you’ve likely encountered jitter. While speed and latency are often discussed, jitter plays a crucial role in delivering a smooth network experience.
In this article, you’ll learn what jitter is, how to calculate it from ping times, and how to use our interactive jitter calculator to analyze your own connection.
Table of Contents
🙋♀️ What Is Jitter?
Jitter refers to the variation in time delay between packets arriving over a network. In simpler terms, it’s the inconsistency in ping times.
Low jitter means a steady and stable connection. High jitter can cause audio dropouts, video lag, and poor online gaming performance.
Use our calculator below to input your ping values and instantly get your jitter result
🌐 Jitter Calculator (From Ping Times)
🔗 Powered by onesdr.com
🧪 Jitter vs Ping
- Ping (latency) measures how long it takes a packet to travel from source to destination and back.
- Jitter measures how much that ping time varies between packets.
You could have an average ping of 20 ms, but if it fluctuates wildly between 10 ms and 60 ms, you’ll experience jitter-related issues.
🧮 How to Calculate Jitter from Ping
The most basic way to calculate jitter is to find the average difference between consecutive ping responses.
Jitter Formula:
Jitter = (|Ping2 - Ping1| + |Ping3 - Ping2| + ... + |PingN - Ping(N-1)|) / (N - 1)Where:
- Ping1, Ping2, …, PingN are individual ping measurements
- N is the total number of pings
⬆️⬇️ Example
If your ping times (in ms) are:20, 22, 25, 21, 23
Step 1: Find differences between consecutive pings|22 - 20| = 2|25 - 22| = 3|21 - 25| = 4|23 - 21| = 2
Step 2: Add and divide by total intervals
Jitter = (2 + 3 + 4 + 2) / 4 = 2.75 ms
📉 What Is a Good Jitter Value?
| Jitter Range | Network Quality |
|---|---|
| 0 – 20 ms | Excellent |
| 20 – 50 ms | Acceptable |
| 50 – 100 ms | Noticeable Lag |
| 100+ ms | Poor / Unusable |
✅ Tips to Reduce Jitter
- Use a wired Ethernet connection instead of Wi-Fi
- Close background downloads or streams
- Upgrade your router or firmware
- Choose low-latency servers if available in games or apps