Jitter

Jitter is the term used in computer networking to refer to packet delay variation — the variance in the rate at which packets arrive at a destination (the average of the squared difference from the mean packet arrival rate).

"High jitter" indicates that packets are arriving at significantly varying rates, possibly due to network congestion, packet loss, and routing of packets in a stream through different paths.

High jitter can significantly degrade the performance of real-time web applications, including voice/video streaming and online gaming.