If you're dealing with a situation in which errors occur at a rate high enough to see random collisions in even CRC16 you need FEC if not spread spectrum techni

If you're dealing with a situation in which errors occur at a rate high enough to see random collisions in even CRC16 you need FEC if not spread spectrum techniques. CRCs can provably detect errors in up to n bits of various configurations depending on selection of the polynomial... And CRC dates back many years and is far from the state of the art. MD5 can produce collisions with as little as 6 bits in error, far less than the 128-bit length would suggest. Cryptographic hash functions are designed with different objectives and methods and are often less well suited, and almost always less well analyzed, for simple error-detection situations.