The invention relates to a method and a receiver having control logic means for determining a target packet level of a jitter buffer adapted to receive packets with digitized signal samples, which packets are subject to delay jitter, from a packet data network. According to the invention, the jitter buffer is made adaptive to current network conditions, i.e., the nature and magnitude of the jitter observed by the receiver, by collecting statistical measures that describe these conditions. The target buffer level is determined with regard to the effect of packet losses in terms of duration of the discontinued playback of the true signal. This effect is derived from statistical measures of the network conditions as perceived by the receiving side and as reflected by a probability mass function which is continuously updated with packet inter-arrival times. The target buffer level is the result of minimization of a cost function which weights the internal buffer delay and an expected length of buffer underflow.