Packet loss is the failure of one or more transmitted packets to arrive at their destination. This event can cause noticeable effects in all types of digital communications.The causes of packet loss include inadequate signal strength at the destination, natural or human-made interference, excessive system noise, hardware failure, software corruption or overburdened network nodes.
Packet loss occurs when one or more packets of data travelling across a computer network fail to reach their destination.
The effects of packet loss:
In data, packet loss produces errors.
In videoconference environments it can create jitter.
In pure audio communications, such as VoIP, it can cause jitter and frequent gaps in received speech.
In the worst cases, packet loss can cause severe mutilation of received data, broken-up images, unintelligible speech or even the complete absence of a received signal.
Packet loss may be measured as frame loss rate defined as the percentage of frames that should have been forwarded by a network load were not forwarded due to lack of resources.
The amount of packet loss that is acceptable depends on the type of data being sent.Anything over 2% packet loss over a period of time is a strong indicator of problems. Most internet protocols can correct for some packet loss, so you really shouldn't expect to see a lot of impact from packet loss until that loss starts to approach 5% and higher. Anything less than this is showing a possible problem, but one that is probably not impacting your experience significantly at present (unless you're an online gamer or something similar that requires 'twitch' reflexes).
