Latency Matters: Planning International Voice and Video

International teams spend hours each day on voice and video calls. Good call quality keeps collaboration natural; poor quality — echo, talk-over, freezes — wears people down and slows work.

Physics sets a minimum

Light in fiber travels roughly 200 km per millisecond. A round trip between India and Western Europe or North America inevitably takes tens to well over a hundred milliseconds. You cannot beat physics, but you can avoid adding unnecessary delay.

Consistency matters more than the minimum

Humans adapt to steady delay surprisingly well. What disrupts calls is jitter — variation in delay — and packet loss. Public internet paths can change and congest, causing both.

How private links help

Global Ethernet and private connectivity follow engineered paths with reserved capacity. Latency is steady and jitter and packet loss are minimal, so voice codecs and video platforms perform at their best.

Quality of service

Prioritise voice and video traffic over bulk transfers like replication or backups on international links.

Route choice

Different submarine cable paths have different latencies. Ask providers about routing options for latency-sensitive traffic.

Endpoint quality

Good headsets, wired connections at desks and well-designed meeting rooms complete the picture.

Cloud meeting platforms

When meetings run on global cloud platforms, connecting to the platform's nearest point of presence efficiently matters. SD-WAN and local breakout can help.

Measure call quality

Use platform analytics to monitor jitter, packet loss and quality scores, and correlate them with network changes.

The bottom line

You can't beat physics, but you can avoid congestion. Private international links deliver steadier calls and more productive global collaboration.

Learn more about Global Ethernet from UbiFi, or talk to our team.