Jitter Tap — your line vs your hands
Run a 3-second jitter test on your line, then tap a beat from memory. Your timing wobble is measured with the same statistic, in the same milliseconds.
Step 1 · Your line
Your line's jitter
Run the 3-second test to draw your line here.
Step 2 · Your hands
How to play
- 1Press “Test my jitter”. Twenty pings to our server take about three seconds and give your line's ping and jitter — the same measurement as the main speed test.
- 2Tap the big card to start the hands test. The ring pulses eight times at today's tempo: listen for four beats, then tap along for four.
- 3The cue stops. Keep tapping the same beat from memory for sixteen more taps. Anywhere on the card, or Space / Enter on a keyboard.
- 4Your taps' interval wobble is scored with the identical jitter statistic and placed beside your line's. Lower is steadier; Human (under 6% wobble) or better counts as a win.
- 5One daily tempo, the same for everyone in South Africa, keeps your streak. Practice mode has five tempos with personal bests; Duel is pass-and-play on one phone.
What jitter is, and why a speed test buries it
A speed test hands you four numbers and most people read one. Download is the headline, upload gets a glance, ping gets a nod from gamers, and jitter — the fourth tile — is skipped because nobody can picture what it means. It is the wobble in your latency: how much the round-trip time changes from one packet to the next. A line with a 12 ms ping that is always 12 ms has almost none. A line that bounces between 8 ms and 60 ms has a lot, and its average ping will still look respectable.
That wobble is what breaks the things people actually complain about. Video calls, voice calls and online games all send a steady stream of small packets and need them to arrive evenly. When they do not, the receiving end either plays them out with gaps (stutter, robot voice, rubber-banding) or holds them in a jitter buffer and adds delay to hide it. Download speed cannot fix either.
What counts as good jitter
On a wired fibre connection, a few milliseconds is normal and under 5 ms is excellent. Widely used voice-over-IP guidance puts the pain threshold at about 30 ms, and competitive gamers tend to notice anything above 15 ms. Wi-Fi typically adds a handful of milliseconds on a good day and tens on a bad one; fixed-LTE and 5G vary with how busy the tower is, which in South Africa means they vary with load-shedding.
The bands this page uses — Excellent under 5 ms, Good under 15, Fair under 30, Poor above — are this site's own guidance built on those figures. If your line reads Fair or Poor, re-test on a cable before blaming the provider: most home jitter starts between the router and the device.
Why we make you tap a beat
Because a number needs a neighbour. This site already puts your reaction time next to your ping and your typing speed next to your download; jitter completes the set. Keeping a beat from memory is the closest thing a human body does to a network delivering packets at a steady rate — nothing correcting you, just your own timekeeping. Your 16 taps give 15 intervals, and those intervals go through the identical function that scores your ping samples. The result is your hands' jitter, in the same milliseconds.
Most people land between 20 and 40 ms. A healthy fibre line lands under 5. The gap is the point: when you see that your own hands wobble twenty times more than your connection does, a 2 ms jitter figure stops being abstract. And when a congested LTE line during load-shedding loses to a person tapping on a phone, that tells you something a comparison table cannot.
If your line lost to your hands
Work from the inside out. Plug a laptop into the router with a cable and re-test: if jitter drops to a few milliseconds, the problem is Wi-Fi, and moving to the 5 GHz band, changing channel or moving the router usually fixes it. If it stays high on a cable, check whether anything is uploading — backups, cloud photo sync, a streaming PC — because a saturated upload queues every other packet behind it. Router quality-of-service settings help there.
If it is still high with nothing else running, the variation is on the line or at the tower. Run the full speed test a few times across the day, note whether the bad readings line up with load-shedding slots, and send your provider the ping and jitter figures rather than a description. Fibre operators and ISPs are separate companies in South Africa, and jitter that appears only at peak hours is usually a capacity conversation with the ISP.
More games
All games →Frequently asked questions
- What is jitter on an internet connection?
- Jitter is how much your latency varies from one packet to the next, measured in milliseconds. A line with a 12 ms ping that is always 12 ms has almost no jitter; one that bounces between 8 and 60 ms has a lot, even though its average ping still looks fine. Video and voice calls and online games are the things jitter breaks.
- How does the 3-second jitter test work?
- The page times 21 small requests to this site's own ping endpoint with the browser's high-resolution clock, discards the first as warm-up, then reports the lowest round trip as ping and the mean absolute change between consecutive samples as jitter. It is the same method and endpoint as the main speed test, so the two figures are comparable.
- What is a good jitter value?
- On wired fibre a few milliseconds is normal and under 5 ms is excellent. Voice-over-IP guidance puts the pain threshold at roughly 30 ms, and competitive gamers notice above about 15 ms. The bands on this page — Excellent under 5, Good under 15, Fair under 30, Poor above — are this site's guidance built on those figures.
- Why are my hands compared with my line?
- Because a number needs a neighbour. Your sixteen taps give fifteen intervals, and those go through the identical statistic that scores your ping samples. Seeing that your own hands wobble twenty times more than a healthy fibre line makes a 2 ms jitter figure concrete; seeing a congested LTE line lose to a person tapping a phone says something a table cannot.
- Why is the grade a percentage but the comparison in milliseconds?
- Human timing error scales with the beat interval, so a fixed 40 ms is easy at 140 BPM and brutal at 60 BPM. The grade uses wobble as a percentage of the interval to stay fair across tempos; the millisecond figure is the one that can honestly sit beside your line's jitter.
- Is anything sent to a server?
- Only the ping requests you start yourself, which carry no data. Tap timings, results, streaks and personal bests stay in your browser's localStorage. The line reading is not added to your speed-test history, because a ping-only run has no download figure.