- The thing with online codes is that while they are quite efficient in data overhead (a few %) they only start working when you have enough data ( > X MB). (ch

- The thing with online codes is that while they are quite efficient in data overhead (a few %) they only start working when you have enough data ( > X MB). (check!) - another problem is that since the system that you need to solve to get your data back is large and random, so in-place updates of the data are impossible. In other words: they only work for immutable data (check!) - The extra information to counter lost messages is scattered over all messages so the client doesn't need to figure out which ones are missing (and doesn't need to tell the server, in this case the telescope). This makes them highly suited for high latency communication (and storage which is in essence the same thing, but that's another story) (check!) They (online codes) were designed for this exact use case.