1. There are still some devices designed for lan-only use that assume packet loss will be extremely rare.
2. TCP throughput suffers when non-congestion related packet-loss exceeds a fairly low value
Re:Wi-Fi over Coax
by gitgudnubs on Monday April 27, 2020 @05:06PM
(#23000020)
Only an idiot would design a device to assume no packet loss, unless they were _also_ allowed to design the network. If you buy such a device and put it on a janky power network, then you have only yourself to blame.
Standards decisions should never be made to accommodate designers that want to assume there's effectively no packet loss.
Some degree of error correction is totally reasonable, but your first point is irrelevant to discussion.
Re:Wi-Fi over Coax
by Dylan16807 on Monday April 27, 2020 @06:31PM
(#23000890)
To a TCP implementation, what's the difference between a dropped packet and one that's delayed by hundreds of round trip times? What problems are caused by not dropping that packet?
(If all the packets are failing to go through for that long, then you have much bigger problems than the error correction.)
Bandwidth is alright-ish at about estimated 2MiB/s here (single pair, about 50ft apart), but RTT of ~4ms with occasional spikes in excess of 1s (at a different location, I've seen spikes in excess of 5s). This is only barely noticeable for accessing the WWW, but unpleasant for interactive GUI work (e.g. via NX or VNC) and a deal-breaker for cluster communication protocols.