Any time you have a high bandwidth delay product (or just high delay) in a network link, fountain codes are useful. Note they aren't useful on top of TCP. Som

Any time you have a high bandwidth delay product (or just high delay) in a network link, fountain codes are useful. Note they aren't useful on top of TCP. Some time in 2006-2010, while I was working on Google's web search infrqstructure, we switched to fountain codes for copying the index around the world. The downsides are increased CPU usage and poor cache locality. Naive implementations aren't compatible with streaming or otherwise starting to use/play data/content before transfer is complete. Without TCP, you'll probably need to implement TCP-friendly flow control.