In a voice packet transmission system, packets experience varying delays which depend on the transmission load at switching and multiplexing nodes and the number of such nodes in the packet transmission path. Heretofore, individual packets which experienced a delay greater than the so-called "normal" delay were considered late packets and were simply discarded. The discarding of such late packets causes distortion in a decoder which is attempting to reconstruct a replica of the transmitted speech signal. The distortion may be in the form of so-called clicks and pops in the reconstructed speech signal. This is extremely annoying and undesirable.