The faster path is the slower one.

A packet of audio that arrives early has to wait. That is what a jitter buffer is: a deliberate delay, deep enough that the latest packet you intend to play still arrives before its turn. So its depth is the spread of arrival times divided by the packet length and rounded up — and the mean arrival appears nowhere in it.

The engine is free and needs no account. Which produces the thing nobody expects. A wifi link averaging 27.4 ms with a 57 ms spread, against a fibre link averaging 40.2 ms with a 4 ms spread: the wifi is 12.9 ms faster on average and arrives 20 ms later, because its buffer has to be 3 packets deep against the fibre's 1. The worst packet is what everybody waits behind. And the trade is never free: the depth is already the smallest whole number of packets that covers the spread, so one packet less is by definition too short for the packet it was sized around. A tool offering a free reduction is offering to stop covering something without saying so. Every lane ships a worked example that costs nothing. Writing the report needs credits.