Packet loss

Packet loss is what happens when small chunks of your call audio leave one side but never arrive at the other. Voice travels over the internet as a stream of tiny packets carried by RTP (Real-time Transport Protocol). If some of those packets get dropped along the way, the receiving end is missing pieces of the conversation, and your agents and leads hear clipped words, dead spots, or a robotic warble.

A little loss is normal on any network, but it adds up fast on a busy dialer. Because Predictive dialing can push many Concurrent calls at once, your connection has to carry a lot of audio at the same time. When the link is too full, packets get discarded, and call quality drops for everyone. Loss above roughly one to two percent is usually noticeable.

Common causes

• A saturated internet link, where total call traffic exceeds available bandwidth.
• Cheap or overloaded network gear that drops packets under load.
• Wi-Fi for agents instead of a wired connection.

Packet loss is closely tied to Jitter and Latency, and together they drag down your MOS (mean opinion score) score, which is the standard way to grade call quality. If you only hear problems in one direction, that is more likely a One-way audio issue than plain loss. To diagnose, count dropped packets at the network level rather than guessing from how a call sounds. Picking an efficient Codec such as G.729 codec uses less bandwidth and gives each packet more room to arrive intact.

The frustrating thing about packet loss is that it is intermittent. A call that sounds fine at ten in the morning can fall apart at two in the afternoon when your team is dialing flat out. That is why a one-off speed test rarely tells you anything useful. You want to watch loss over time, ideally during your busiest hours, so you can see whether it climbs as call volume rises. If it does, the link or the gear is the bottleneck, not the carrier. Fix the network first, because no amount of carrier tuning will help if your own connection is dropping the audio before it ever leaves the building.