Gaming Networking Glossary

Bufferbloat is the latency caused when a router's send buffer fills up — a fast line can suddenly feel like a dial-up connection during any upload.

Jitter is the short-term variation of your ping — the difference between one round-trip time and the next.

MTU is the largest packet size a link will carry without fragmentation — a mis-set MTU is a common cause of stealth packet loss.

Packet loss is the percentage of network packets that never reach the destination within the expected window.

Peering is a direct network interconnect between two providers so their traffic doesn't have to traverse a paid transit link.

Ping is the round-trip time in milliseconds for a packet to travel from your device to the game server and back.

A private backbone is a routing provider's own leased or owned network used to bypass public internet exchanges.

Route optimisation forwards your game traffic through a provider's private backbone instead of your ISP's default path.

Rubber banding is the visible symptom of outbound packet loss — the server snapping your character back to its last confirmed position.

Tick rate is how many times per second a game server samples the world and sends updates — measured in Hz.

Traceroute is a diagnostic command that lists every router on the path from your device to a destination, with per-hop round-trip times.

A VPN routes and encrypts all your traffic through a chosen server for privacy or geographic access — it is not a gaming performance tool.