NetEQ is the adaptive jitter buffer and concealment engine at the heart of WebRTC audio, inherited from GIPS (later Google). It does far more than queue packets: it continuously time-scales the audio — accelerating playback to drain a building buffer, expanding it to ride out a gap — using techniques that change duration without shifting pitch, so the listener doesn't hear the adjustment. When a packet is genuinely lost it invokes packet loss concealment, and when silence arrives via DTX it inserts comfort noise. NetEQ's constant tug-of-war between latency and loss is a big part of why WebRTC voice sounds smooth on messy networks, and it is the reference other stacks are measured against.
