fundamentals
Latency is the delay between someone speaking and the other person hearing it. Under about 150 milliseconds it is unnoticeable, but higher latency causes the awkward talking-over-each-other feel of a bad video call.
Every VoIP call has some latency. Voice has to travel from one device to the internet, across the network, and back down to the other device. The question is not whether latency exists but whether it stays low enough to feel like a normal conversation.
Under roughly 150 milliseconds round trip, most people cannot consciously detect the delay. Between 150 and 300 milliseconds, calls start to feel slightly off, with both people occasionally speaking over each other. Above 300 milliseconds, conversation becomes genuinely difficult.
Distance is the biggest factor. A call between two people in the same city has far less latency than one crossing an ocean or bouncing through several network hops. A slow or congested internet connection adds further delay on top.
Worked example
A 6-person support team based in the UK takes calls routed through a US-based call centre server.
Moving to a provider with servers closer to the UK cuts round-trip latency from around 250ms to under 100ms, and agents stop talking over customers mid-sentence.
Why it matters to a small team
High latency quietly damages customer perception. Callers tend to blame the business ("this call feels weird") rather than the network. Choosing a provider with servers close to your customers keeps conversations feeling natural.
Under 150 milliseconds round trip is considered good and generally unnoticeable. Between 150 and 300 milliseconds calls start to feel slightly delayed, and above 300 milliseconds conversation becomes noticeably difficult with frequent talking over each other.
Distance between callers, the number of network hops the data takes, a congested internet connection, or a provider whose servers sit far from one or both callers all add latency. Physical distance is usually the biggest single factor.
Latency is the overall delay before a voice packet arrives, while jitter is how much that delay varies from packet to packet. A call can have low latency but high jitter, or the reverse, and each causes a different kind of audio problem.
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