Acceptable packet loss by activity
Voice and gaming have the tightest limits because they use UDP with nothing resent and very little buffering. Video calls tolerate a little more because the codecs are designed to degrade gracefully, dropping resolution before freezing. Streaming and downloads use TCP, which resends what is lost, so they keep working at loss rates that would make a call impossible. They slow down instead.
| Activity | Great | Acceptable | Poor | Unusable |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Competitive gaming | Under 0.5% | 0.5 to 1% | 1 to 3% | Over 3% |
| Voice calls (VoIP) | Under 0.5% | 0.5 to 1% | 1 to 3% | Over 3% |
| Video calls | Under 1% | 1 to 2% | 2 to 5% | Over 5% |
| Streaming video | Under 1% | 1 to 3% | 3 to 8% | Over 8% |
| Browsing and downloads | Under 2% | 2 to 5% | 5 to 10% | Over 10% |
Is 1% packet loss bad?
At 1%, a game sending 60 updates a second loses one about every two seconds, and a voice call loses roughly one 20 ms slice of sound every two seconds. Modern voice codecs hide most of that; older desk phones do not. In a fast shooter, 1% shows as small but real hitches. For everything else it is barely noticeable. So 1% is acceptable for most people and borderline for competitive play.
Is 2%, 5% or 10% packet loss bad?
- 2%: noticeable in any game or call. Video calls will drop quality now and then. Worth fixing.
- 5%: calls break up, games rubber-band constantly, and downloads run well below the line's speed. Something is clearly wrong.
- 10% or more: most real-time apps become unusable, and web pages stall. Usually a fault: a failing router, a damaged line, or wifi at the very edge of its range.
Why the pattern matters as much as the percentage
Averages hide bursts. A minute with 1% loss spread evenly is a steady mild annoyance. A minute with 1% loss all in one half-second burst is fifty-nine seconds of perfect connection and one frozen moment, which you might not notice at all in a stream and might lose a round over in a game. Short tests make this worse: a five-second test that falls between bursts reports 0%.
That is why the test on this site runs for 30 seconds by default, draws every packet on a timeline, and counts "spiky seconds" separately from the overall percentage. For intermittent problems, the 60-second stability test is the better choice.
What 0% really means
A 0% result from 1,500 packets means fewer than one in 1,500 packets was lost in that run, to that destination. It does not guarantee zero loss at every moment or on every route. If your test is clean and one particular game or service still shows loss, the problem is on the route to it or at its end. That is still useful to know: it rules out your own line, which is the part you control.