Jitter is not network latency! :)
Just as a general Wifi tip, in heavily populated areas I have to use 5 GHz to get reliable streaming. The normal 2 GHz wifi band is super congested.
For music and video streaming 30 milliseconds is fine, heck even a couple of hundred milliseconds. For gaming, probably not.
OK, so it is up to your streaming device to buffer as needed. That is, it keeps a bucket of say 1-5 seconds of material in memory. Then there are two independent threads at work. One threads feeds your TV or DAC at a very steady pace. 30 frames per second, or 44.1 kHz per second, that sort of thing.
So long as the bucket stays more full than empty, you never see this varying latency, because there’s another thread that copes with it.
You can think of it like a bucket with a hole at the bottom. That hole spills at a steady pace, even though the water going into the bucket is filled a cup at a time.
At first, the hole at the bottom is plugged. The bucket gets mostly filled, and only then is the hole unplugged. The water can vary from 20% to 100%, but the water comes out at a steady stream.
So, the actual digital jitter that you experience is not up to your network so much as your streamer. However if your digital connection is just slow, or congested enough, the bucket will empty and the data will stop flowing and you’ll hear it. But so long as that doesn’t happen, you are really not going to experience this latency in terms of audio quality. It will be great until it’s crap. That is, until it stutters or stops.
Going back though, yeah, I like to run Ethernet not for sound quality per se, so much as that I have so many neighbors with Wifi devices.
One thing that can matter is your throughput. That is the bits/second you get. For instance, if you are streaming a DSD file, and you have a slow Wifi, then you will have regular stuttering issues.
Best,
Erik
