System and method of compensating propagation time variations and substituting for lost packets in a packetized voice communication system

In a packetized communication system, packets are dispatched to a receiving node (10) for reassembly and presentation to a user. Packets propagating over dynamic paths have propagation variations between subsequent packets. Interactive packetized voice communication systems mandate that end-to-end delays be minimized. This results in voice gaps between an on-time synthesized voice data (602''') and a subsequent delayed synthesized voice data (603'''). Voice gaps are temporarily patched with voice prediction samples and end-to-end timing is adjusted to minimized prediction samples. When packets are lost in the network, prediction packets are substituted and annunciated to a user until valid packets are received.