[Bloat] "a bandwidth breakthrough"

[Jonathan Morton]

>> I'm actually sort of surprised that the inter-packet version isn't already built into wireless technologies by default, especially the ones that do packet aggregation.  In any case it is not totally new - a very similar idea is used in CDs.
> 
> In the case of the four Austrian 3.99G mobile operators we tested,
> the fun answer is that they completely conceal loss on layer 2. As
> a side effect, they delay packets by sometimes huge amounts: Waiting
> for an ICMP echo reply can take a few hundred seconds (!), think
> trains in tunnels, but packets do arrive eventually.

But that's not FEC, it's ARQ.  And that's precisely why FEC can be better than ARQ.

 - Jonathan Morton