<p dir="ltr">> By curiosity, what is now responsible for the drops if not the congestion?</p>
<p dir="ltr">I think the point was not that observed drops are not caused by congestion, but that congestion doesn't reliably cause drops. Correlation is not causation.</p>
<p dir="ltr">There are also cases when drops are in fact caused by something other than congestion, including faulty ADSL phone lines. Some local loop providers have been known to explicitly consider several percent of packet loss due to line conditions as "not a fault", to the consternation of the actual ISP who was trying to provide a decent device over it.</p>
<p dir="ltr"> - Jonathan Morton<br>
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