What is Jitter and what effect does it have on video calls?
Jitter is the random variation in latency due to things like competing processes running on the terminal (for example on your desktop PC), other traffic temporarily blocking the path through routers along the way, or even the network path changing during a videoconference. This random variation is one of several things that cause packets to arrive out of order from their transmitted order. Jitter results in uneven and unpredictable quality within a videoconference and the endstation client will try to compensate for it by buffering the traffic up to some finite time, before playing it out to you. This increases the latency even further.
