What is packet loss?

A phone call has no time to ask for anything twice. By the moment a missing packet could be resent, the conversation has moved on.

Systems paper over small gaps by repeating the previous fragment of sound. It works for a packet here and there and falls apart in a run.

Thresholds are tighter than people expect. Around 1% is noticeable on a call, and past 3% people start asking each other to repeat things.

Causes cluster. Overloaded connections, failing cables, and wireless interference account for most of what small offices see.

A call sends 50 small packets of audio every second, each holding 20 milliseconds of sound. Lose one and nobody notices, because the phone fills the hole by repeating the packet before it.

Now say a caller on a weak cell signal is leaving her number: 555-0142. Right as she says the one, the network drops ten packets in a row. That's a fifth of a second of audio, about the length of a short spoken digit. The repeat trick can't cover a hole that size, so the listener hears 555-04, a click, then 2.

Here's what makes burst loss expensive. Averaged over a three-minute call, those ten packets come to about 0.1% loss, a figure any phone system report would call healthy. The quality score looks fine, and the callback number on your notepad is one digit short.

Loss happens at a specific place, and you can narrow it down with two free tests before calling anyone.

First, ping your own router from a computer on the office network. Leave it running for ten minutes during a busy part of the day. Any loss here is inside your building: wifi interference, a bad cable, or a tired switch. Move the computer to a wired connection and run it again. If the loss vanishes, you've found it, and the fix costs a cable.

Second, ping a stable address outside your network for the same ten minutes. Clean results to the router and loss to the outside points at your internet connection or your provider. Save the output, because a support agent will take a log with timestamps more seriously than a description of choppy calls.

Neither test helps with loss on the caller's end. When a caller's words drop out and yours don't, reading the detail back is the only repair. Say the number aloud and let them correct it.

Words lost on the way to GreetKeeper are lost for transcription too. Speech recognition cannot recover audio that never arrived.

That shows up as a transcript with gaps, and it points at the connection rather than at the assistant's understanding.

Callers on mobile networks in poor coverage produce exactly this, and there is nothing either end can do about it beyond asking them to move.