What is Outbound Packet Loss & How to Detect It

Imagine you're on an important Zoom call, and suddenly, your voice starts cutting out, or your video freezes mid-sentence. Frustrating, right? One of the sneaky culprits behind this issue is outbound packet loss, when data packets leaving your network never make it to their destination.

Outbound packet loss can wreak havoc on voice calls, video meetings, online gaming, and cloud apps, making everything feel laggy or unresponsive. Unlike inbound packet loss (where data coming to you is lost), outbound packet loss means your network is struggling to send data properly.

In this article, we’ll break down what outbound packet loss is, why it happens, how to detect it, and—most importantly—how to fix it before it drives you (or your users) crazy. Let’s dive in!

To refresh our memories, let’s first review what packet loss is.

Packet loss happens when data packets travelling across a network are dropped along the way and fail to reach their destination. These network packets, tiny chunks of data, are sent back and forth over the Internet to deliver everything from emails and websites to video calls and online gaming sessions. When some of these packets get dropped, delayed, or lost, it can cause slow performance, buffering, lag, or even disconnections.

Packet loss can be inbound or outbound:

• Inbound Packet Loss → Packets coming to your network are lost before they arrive.
• Outbound Packet Loss → Packets sent from your network never reach their destination.

Even small amounts of packet loss (especially for real-time applications like VoIP, video conferencing, or gaming) can cause noticeable disruptions—garbled audio, frozen screens, or delayed responses.

What Is Packet Loss

Explore what is packet loss, how packet loss impacts network performance, and how to reduce packet loss to minimize its impact on businesses.

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As we mentioned above, there are two types of packet loss, inbound and outbound. Outbound packet loss happens when packets leave your network but fail to reach the destination—whether that's a VoIP call server, a cloud application, or an online gaming server. These lost packets result in incomplete or delayed communication, causing disruptions in voice, video, and data transmission.

This loss can happen at several points along the way, including:

• Your local network: Issues with your router, firewall, or switch can drop packets before they even leave your network.
• Your ISP’s infrastructure: Network congestion, routing problems, or bandwidth limitations from your service provider can cause packet loss.
• The public internet: If packets have to travel across multiple networks, bad routing paths, overloaded servers, or network outages can lead to losses.

Unlike latency or jitter, which cause delays, packet loss means the data never arrives at its destination, forcing applications to request retransmission (which slows things down) or simply drop the information altogether (which leads to voice or video glitches).

Packet loss can happen in two directions: inbound (receiving data) and outbound (sending data). While both can impact network performance, they cause different types of issues and require different troubleshooting approaches.

Data packets from external sources fail to reach your network.

Common Symptoms

• You hear choppy or robotic audio on VoIP calls.
• Videos buffer or freeze while streaming.
• Web pages load slowly or fail to load.
• Gaming feels laggy or stutters.

Who Experiences the Issue?

• You (the receiver) experience the problem because your network isn't getting all the data.

Data packets sent from your network never reach their destination.

Common Symptoms

• Others hear you cutting out or robotic on VoIP calls.
• Your video freezes or lags in a meeting, but you see others clearly.
• Your game actions are delayed or cause “rubberbanding.”
• File uploads fail or take longer than expected.

Who Experiences the Issue?

• The person or service on the other end experiences the problem because they’re missing data from you.

1. Inbound packet loss affects how well you receive data, things like streaming, downloading, and loading web pages.
2. Outbound packet loss affects how well you send data, impacting your voice on calls, video uploads, and sending real-time inputs in games.
3. Who notices the issue?
   • Inbound packet loss: You experience problems (e.g., slow or glitchy video).
   • Outbound packet loss: Others experience problems (e.g., they hear your voice breaking up).

• If you can hear others fine, but they say you sound bad → Outbound packet loss
• If your video looks smooth, but others say you’re freezing → Outbound packet loss
• If your game lags but others don’t notice issues from you → Inbound packet loss
• If websites take forever to load or streaming buffers a lot → Inbound packet loss

Both types of packet loss can be caused by network congestion, faulty hardware, or poor Internet connections, but knowing which type you're dealing with can help you troubleshoot quicker and easier.

Inbound or outbound packet loss can ruin your calls, slow down your apps, and frustrate your users—but you don’t have to play the guessing game anymore. Obkio’s Network and Packet Loss Monitoring Tool continuously tracks both inbound and outbound packet loss, helping you pinpoint exactly where, when, and why it's happening.

How does Obkio do it?

Obkio uses synthetic traffic to monitor your network 24/7, proactively detecting packet loss and performance issues before they impact your business.

More than just packet loss monitoring—Obkio helps you troubleshoot too!

• Device monitoring—Identify if network hardware (routers, firewalls, etc.) is causing packet loss.
• Traceroutes—Pinpoint exactly where packet loss is happening along the network path.
• End-to-end visibility—Monitor from your local network to your ISP and cloud applications.
• Real-time alerts & historical data—Quickly spot trends and troubleshoot recurring issues.

Get ahead of network issues before they impact performance.

So we now know that outbound packet loss happens when data packets sent from your network never reach their destination. But why does it happen? Below are some of the most common culprits behind outbound packet loss and how they impact your network performance.

Keep in mind that you don’t need to manually identify these issues in your network - that’s what your Network Monitoring tool is for! But, it’s still important to know the common causes so you know how to troubleshoot.

Just like a traffic jam on a highway, network congestion happens when too much data is being sent at once, overwhelming your network and causing packets to be dropped. This is common during peak usage hours when multiple users or devices are competing for bandwidth.

✅ How to Fix It: Prioritize critical traffic using Quality of Service (QoS) settings and monitor bandwidth usage to prevent overloading.

Your Internet Service Provider (ISP) plays a big role in outbound packet loss. If your connection is unstable, has high latency, or suffers from frequent interruptions, packets can get lost before they even leave your network.

✅ How to Fix It: Run a network monitoring tool (like Obkio!) to track ISP performance and identify ISP issues, and consider upgrading your plan if bandwidth is insufficient.

Faulty or aging network equipment can struggle to process and transmit packets efficiently, leading to outbound packet loss. Routers, switches, and firewalls with outdated firmware or failing components can introduce errors and drop packets.

✅ How to Fix It: Regularly update firmware, replace aging hardware, and monitor device health to prevent failures.

Incorrect settings on network devices, such as MTU (Maximum Transmission Unit) mismatches, incorrect QoS settings, or bad VLAN configurations, can cause packet loss. These misconfigurations prevent data from being transmitted correctly.

✅ How to Fix It: Review and optimize network settings to ensure they align with your traffic requirements.

When routers, firewalls, or other network devices experience high CPU usage, they struggle to process packets efficiently, leading to packet drops. This often happens when a device is overloaded with traffic or running too many security or QoS processes at once.

✅ How to Fix It: Monitor CPU usage on network devices and upgrade hardware or optimize settings if performance is maxed out.

For Wi-Fi users, interference from other wireless networks, household devices, or physical obstacles can degrade signal quality and cause outbound packets to be lost before they reach the router.

✅ How to Fix It: Switch to a wired connection if possible, or use a Wi-Fi analyzer tool to find the best channel and reduce interference.

Firewalls, intrusion prevention systems (IPS), and packet filtering rules are essential for network security, but they can sometimes incorrectly block or drop legitimate outbound packets—especially if misconfigured.

✅ How to Fix It: Review firewall and security settings to ensure critical traffic isn’t being blocked unintentionally.

Manually diagnosing outbound packet loss can be a headache. Luckily, we’ve got some tips and tools for you in the next section!

If you suspect outbound packet loss, the next step is to test and measure it. Outbound packet loss can be tricky to detect because it impacts others more than it impacts you directly. Fortunately, there are several methods you can use to identify and diagnose outbound packet loss, ranging from basic command-line tools to more advanced network monitoring solutions.

There are several tools and techniques to help diagnose the issue:

One of the easiest ways to detect packet loss is by using ping and traceroute. These command-line tools help you test network connectivity and identify where packets are being dropped along the route from your network to a destination.

The ping command can check packet loss by sending ICMP echo requests to a target destination (such as Google’s DNS at 8.8.8.8). Run:

If you see packet loss in the results, that’s a sign your network is dropping outbound packets.

traceroute (Linux/macOS) or tracert (Windows) helps identify which hop in the network path is causing the loss. It traces the path packets take through the network, from your device to the destination server, showing where packet loss occurs along the way.

A more advanced tool like mtr provides real-time packet loss stats at each hop.

How to use it:

• Type traceroute <destination IP> (or tracert on Windows) to visualize the path. If you see drops at a specific hop, you know where the packet loss is occurring.
• You can also use a dedicated traceroute tool like Obkio Vision, a visual traceroute feature that can be used as a standalone tool or in correlation with Obkio’s complete Network Performance Monitoring tool.

For a more comprehensive view, network monitoring tools like Obkio can help you continuously monitor packet loss and other performance metrics across your entire network. Obkio uses synthetic traffic to simulate real-world network conditions and detect packet loss before it affects users.

Obkio’s Network Performance Monitoring solution can:

• Generates synthetic traffic between two endpoints (like your remote office and a data center) to measure both inbound and outbound packet loss in real time.
• It automatically alerts you if packet loss exceeds acceptable thresholds, helping you detect issues proactively.
• It can pinpoint where the loss is happening—whether it's inside your network, at your ISP, or further along the internet route.
• It can quickly identify the root cause of outbound packet loss, whether it’s congestion, a misconfigured firewall, or a faulty router.

We have a complete article to teach you how to measure and identify packet loss with Obkio, so you can follow those steps to deploy.

If you're using VoIP or video conferencing tools like Zoom or Microsoft Teams, packet loss can have a noticeable impact on audio and video quality. Poor call quality, dropped audio, and laggy video are common symptoms of outbound packet loss.

Most VoIP and video conferencing platforms have built-in quality metrics (like jitter, latency, and packet loss). Monitoring these metrics regularly can give you an early warning of packet loss issues.

In VoIP/UC tools, look for metrics like MOS (Mean Opinion Score) or R-Factor for VoIP quality. These metrics directly reflect how packet loss is affecting call quality.

• MOS (Mean Opinion Score): Measures voice quality—low scores may indicate packet loss.
• Jitter & Latency Monitoring: High jitter or latency fluctuations can suggest packet loss.

Screenshot from Obkio's Network Monitoring tool showing the Network Response Time and VoIP Quality graphs

By regularly measuring packet loss, you can catch and fix issues before they become a major problem. While the tools above can help you detect outbound packet loss, Obkio takes it a step further with continuous monitoring and real-time alerts, so you can fix the problem before it disrupts your business.

Imagine you're on an important Zoom call, and suddenly, your voice starts cutting out. The other participants tell you that you sound robotic or that your audio is completely dropping—but you can still hear them just fine. Or maybe you're trying to upload a file to the cloud, and the progress bar seems frozen. These are classic symptoms of outbound packet loss.

Outbound packet loss can seriously impact communication, gaming, and business applications. Unlike inbound packet loss (where you struggle to receive data), outbound packet loss affects the data you're sending—which means others experience issues even if your connection seems fine on your end.

Let’s look at how outbound packet loss affects different applications in your network:

VoIP (Voice over IP) and Unified Communications (UC) applications, like phone calls, SIP trunks, and cloud PBX systems, rely on continuous voice packet transmission. When outbound packet loss occurs, it results in:

🔇 Choppy or garbled audio: Missing packets mean parts of the conversation get lost, making speech sound choppy, robotic, or distorted to others.

📞 Dropped calls: Severe packet loss can cause calls to disconnect unexpectedly.

🎤 One-way audio issues: If outbound packets aren’t reaching the recipient, they may not hear you, even though you can hear them. Your audio may also cut in and out.

Video conferencing tools like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet are even more sensitive to outbound packet loss because they send both audio and video streams. When packets don’t make it through, you might experience:

📹 Pixelated or frozen video: Video frames arrive out of order or don’t arrive at all. This causes your video to freeze, lag or appear pixelated, while others can still see each other normally.

🎙 Audio and video desync: Outbound packets being lost or delayed causes mismatched lip movements and audio so that your voice is out of sync with the video.

🔄 Connection instability: Frequent buffering, lag, or dropped calls disrupt meetings.

Graphs from Obkio's Network Monitoring tool showing increasing packet loss on different netowrk locations and applications

For gamers, outbound packet loss can mean the difference between winning and losing. Since multiplayer games rely on sending real-time data (such as your character’s movements or actions), outbound packet loss causes:

🎮 Input lag and stuttering: Commands take longer to register because packets are being lost. So you may press a button, but the game takes too long to respond.

🔄 Rubberbanding: Your character moves unpredictably, suddenly "teleports" or "rubberbands" due to missing data packets.

⏳ Disconnections: Severe packet loss can get you kicked from a match or server.

Modern businesses rely on cloud-based applications and SaaS platforms like Google Drive, Microsoft 365, Salesforce, and Dropbox. Outbound packet loss can slow down communication between your network and the cloud, causing:

⏳ Slow uploads & syncing issues: Files may take forever to upload, or updates won’t sync in real time.

🚫 Session timeouts & errors: Web-based tools might log you out or fail to save changes due to lost data. Remote desktop (RDP) connections lag or time out, and cloud-based tools (Google Docs, Office 365) frequently lose connection.

📉 Reduced productivity – Employees struggle with laggy applications, affecting efficiency.

Outbound packet loss doesn’t just slow things down—it can completely disrupt critical applications. Even a small amount of packet loss (1-2%) can cause noticeable performance issues, making everyday tasks frustrating and unreliable.

Outbound packet loss can disrupt VoIP calls, video meetings, cloud applications, and gaming. The good news? There are ways to reduce and fix packet loss by optimizing your network, prioritizing critical traffic, and working with your ISP. It sounds overwhelming, but once you’ve used your Network Monitoring tool to identify the cause, source, and location of the outbound packet loss, the rest is easy as pie.

Not all network traffic is equally important. Quality of Service (QoS) settings help prioritize critical applications like VoIP, video conferencing, and cloud services over less time-sensitive traffic (like file downloads).

How to implement QoS:

• Configure QoS rules on your router or firewall to give higher priority to real-time traffic (VoIP, video, gaming).
• Enable DSCP (Differentiated Services Code Point) tagging to ensure critical packets are processed first.
• Limit bandwidth-heavy applications (e.g., large file downloads) during peak hours.

QoS ensures that time-sensitive outbound packets aren’t delayed or dropped due to congestion.

Aging or overloaded network devices (like routers, switches, and firewalls) can struggle to handle high traffic loads, leading to packet buffering or drops.

What to check & upgrade:

• Ensure your router, switch, or firewall can handle your network’s bandwidth needs.
• Replace outdated cables (use Cat6 or higher for wired connections).
• For Wi-Fi users, upgrade to a Wi-Fi 6 router to reduce interference and improve stability.

By upgrading your network hardware, you ensure faster packet processing and reduced loss caused by device limitations.

Misconfigured network settings can unintentionally cause packet drops, especially in complex environments with firewalls, VPNs, and SD-WAN configurations.

How to optimize settings:

• Reduce MTU size (Maximum Transmission Unit) if packets are being fragmented or dropped.
• Disable unnecessary firewall rules or overly strict packet filtering.
• Fine-tune load balancing settings if using multiple ISPs.

Optimizing your network configurations ensures that network packets are transmitted efficiently without being blocked or fragmented.

When your network is overloaded with traffic, packets compete for bandwidth, leading to packet drops. Managing network congestion helps keep outbound traffic flowing smoothly.

How to reduce congestion:

• Increase Internet bandwidth if your current plan is insufficient for your organization’s needs.
• Schedule large data transfers (backups, updates) during off-peak hours.
• Distribute traffic using VLANs or segment networks to prevent bottlenecks.

Reducing network congestion leads to less network strain, fewer delays, and improved overall performance.

Sometimes, the problem isn’t on your end—it’s with your Internet Service Provider (ISP). If outbound packet loss persists, it may be due to:

• Overloaded ISP networks
• Poor routing between your network and remote servers
• Issues at the last-mile connection

How to work with your ISP:

• Run packet loss tests using tools like Obkio’s Network Monitoring to gather data on where packet loss is happening.
• Provide traceroute results to your ISP to show network hops with issues.
• Request a route optimization or check for network congestion on their end.

Troubleshooting Packet Loss: The Comprehensive Guide

Lost packets? No problem! Follow our guide and master the art of troubleshooting packet loss and say goodbye to network issues for good!

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Outbound packet loss can wreak havoc on VoIP calls, video conferencing, cloud applications, and online gaming. Throughout this article, we covered:

• What outbound packet loss is and how it impacts network performance
• Common causes, including network congestion, hardware issues, and ISP problems
• How to detect it using ping, traceroute, and network monitoring tools
• Solutions to fix and reduce packet loss, such as QoS, hardware upgrades, and ISP troubleshooting

The key takeaway? Proactive monitoring is the best defense against outbound packet loss. Instead of waiting for users to report dropped calls or laggy video, you can detect and troubleshoot issues before they impact performance.

That’s where Obkio’s Network Monitoring Tool comes in. Obkio uses synthetic traffic monitoring to continuously test your network, identify outbound packet loss in real-time, and help you troubleshoot with:

🚀 End-to-end network performance monitoring

🖥️ Device monitoring for routers, switches, and firewalls

📍 Traceroutes to pinpoint problem areas**

Don’t let packet loss slow you down.