What Is Packet Loss?

What is Packet Loss?

Introduction

When using diagnostic tools such as ping or traceroute, you may have noticed a term being used called "packet loss." This is an important metric that shows whether or not all your packets have made it to the destination server; any value greater than zero (>0%) is an indicates that a packet has been lost.

How can packet loss occur?

Packet loss often occurs with a client-side networking issue; from being too far away from your wireless network to a faulty network cable -- even a solar flare passing through can interfere with the delivery of traffic.

However, that is not to say that packet loss always occurs due to a client issue! As mentioned above, it only happens to most users as a result of their own network, however, packet loss can occur anywhere throughout a packet's journey to a particular destination. Packet loss can occur due to any one (or more) of the following:

• Interference
  • Poor wiring (damaged shielding on your Ethernet cable), high noise environments (example: your wiring around a microwave)
• Congestion
  • This can be caused by a fibre cut (forcing traffic to be rerouted), DDoS attacks, overloaded routers, or overloaded ports (i.e. a way to think of this is with your home network; assuming you get the full speed of your 100 Mbps Internet package, your network will become "congested" when one user starts a download at full speed while another user attempting to watch a video will have little-to-no bandwidth left)

Conclusion

Having listed some of the most common ways that packet loss can occur, it becomes clear that it is very easy for a packet to be lost (once in a while). If packet loss occurs often to a specific network, it may be an issue of congestion; however, if packet loss only occurs on traffic exiting your network, it will likely be an issue with your wiring, choice of cabling or local congestion.