FIELD NOTE · LATENCY
See the spike
before it drops your call.
Speed-test sites give you a single number. Latency History gives you the line: the actual ping to your gateway, sampled every second, with P95, jitter, and 24-hour availability rolled in. Spot the spike before someone has to ask you to repeat yourself.
Hover any sample for the exact reading.
What you are looking at
The chart plots one sample per second. The vertical axis is milliseconds (lower is better). The thin line is each individual sample. The bolder line is the rolling P95: the worst 5% of samples. The grey marks at the bottom are dropped samples, i.e. a request that did not come back in time. Hover any point to see its exact value, the timestamp, and whether it was a drop.
Why averages lie
Most tools show you an average. A 30-millisecond average ping looks healthy. But a Zoom call does not care about the average. It stutters when the worst 1% of packets arrive late, and that is what P95 measures. If your average is 30 ms while P95 sits at 280 ms, your call is going to stutter even though "speed test passed".
Jitter is the shape of your ping
Jitter is how much the ping value bounces between samples. A steady 50 ms is workable. 50 ms swinging to 200 ms and back ten times a second is what makes voices sound robotic. Latency History surfaces jitter as a separate number above the chart so you can read it without doing the math.
Reading the spikes
The shape of a spike tells you who to talk to.
- One spike, then back to baseline. Probably interference: microwave, neighbour’s network, the doorbell.
- A sustained climb that does not come back down. Your ISP link is saturated, often because someone on your network started a backup or a 4K stream.
- A regular pulse every few seconds. A scheduled task on a device in your LAN, sometimes a poorly configured smart-home hub.
Pairs with Connection Log and ISP Report
When a spike turns into an actual drop, Connection Log records the rejoin as a session with duration. When the same shape shows up across different networks (home, hotel, tether), ISP Report tells you whose network you are on at that moment. The three together turn "the Wi-Fi is bad" into "this hop, this hour, this provider".
Where to find it in the app
Click the menu-bar icon to open the popover, scroll to the bottom, and click Insights. Latency History is the top-left card. The chart starts the moment you open it; leave the popover open if you want to capture a longer window.
TL;DR
Speed tests show one number. Latency History shows the line. P95 and jitter tell you what your call will sound like. Pair with Connection Log and ISP Report to tell apart a Wi-Fi problem from an ISP problem.