A communication device and method provide selective control of a level of buffering of at least one data stream. The communication device includes a jitter buffer (202), a jitter buffer control unit (204) and a user interface (206). An instruction received via an input to a user interface (206) indicates a jitter buffer strategy (510), such as enabling a jitter buffer or setting a size of a jitter buffer, based on the user input. The control unit (204) sets the buffer strategy based in the instruction, and a data stream transmitted via a packet-switched network is received (530) and buffered for play out based on the buffer strategy (540).