Packets are small formatted units of data that you send and receive when accessing the Internet. In layman’s terms, Internet packet loss occurs when one or more of these packets fail to reach their destination on the Internet. For you, this means slow downs, disruptions, or even a total loss of connectivity.

Many activities and applications are do not handle packet loss well, notably real time audio or video, and gaming.

If you are on a Skype or VOIP phone call over a lossy connection, there isn’t enough time to resend the packets since your conversation is in real time. As packet loss increases, you’ll start to hear distortion, audio drop outs, or lose the call entirely. When video conferencing, packet loss results in blocky video and garbled or muted audio. Packet loss can have devastating effects on online video gaming, often leading to terrible lag and high latency making games virtually unplayable.

It’s possible that with age your router, firewall, or any network switches simply can’t keep up with the demand you’re placing on it. This is especially true the faster your Internet connection becomes.

The end result is that any traffic that exceeds the capacity of the device will result in packet loss as you’ve hit the maximum throughput your hardware can provide.

Regardless of the root cause, Speedify instantly detects packet loss on all available Internet connections, and will resend lost packets almost instantaneously. That way, Speedify prevents slowdowns before they occur. For you, this means solid redundancy in the face of slow or unreliable connections.

Learn more about how to fix packet loss with Speedify