Forward Erasure Correction (FEC) and network performance

Fri Apr 10 18:47:25 UTC 2009

Lamar Owen wrote:
> On Friday 10 April 2009 13:43:26 Matthew Kaufman wrote:
>> The bit error rate of copper is better than 1 error in 10^9 bits. The
>> bit error rate of fiber is better than 1 error in 10^12 bits. So the
>> packet loss rate of the transport media is approximately zero.*
> 
> This sounds pretty good, until you realize that it means you can expect 36 
> errors in 10 hours on a 100% utilized gigabit fiber link.
> 

That *still* sounds good to me. There's a reason reliable transport 
protocols work the way they do... and integrity protection better than 
simple checksums is well-understood these days as well.

Matthew Kaufman