AbstractThis work presents a contribution to the solution of the average agreement problem on a network with quantized links. Starting from the well‐known linear diffusion algorithm, we propose a simple and effective adaptation that is able to preserve the average of states and to drive the system near to the consensus value, when a uniform quantization is applied to communication between agents. The properties of this algorithm are investigated both by a worst‐case analysis and by a probabilistic analysis, and are shown to depend on the spectral properties of the evolution matrix. A special attention is devoted to the issue of the dependence of the performance on the number of agents, and several examples are given. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.