3 ms·

WiFi generally doesn't drop packets - it's usual failure mode is for latency to spike horribly for a clump of packets.

• piannucci 8y ago
  Under the hood, what's happening is that the physical layer is reporting that a packet failed to decode, and the link layer is attempting retransmission at a series of lower and lower fallback rates. It's designed this way because if it fails to deliver a packet, TCP will freak out. There's an RFC about the general case of designing link layers to hide random losses: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3366 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3366
  • zamadatix 8y ago
    It's not so much just because "tcp will freak out" as much as it is understanding no transport layer retransmission algorithms operating on the scale of 100+ms can be a replacement for 100us+ link layer reliability mechanisms like FEC and retransmission.
  • gsich 8y ago
    Packet loss is an essential part of TCP to determine max. throughput.
    • jabl 8y ago
      Not with BBR.