I think communications theorists would argue that retransmitting is essentially an FEC, and likely a suboptimal one for these links. That said, real-world const

I think communications theorists would argue that retransmitting is essentially an FEC, and likely a suboptimal one for these links. That said, real-world constrains don't always match up with theory, while modern optical communication makes extensive use of FEC (however RS codes are not used much anymore, in long-haul it's LDPC codes) AFAIK FECs for these type of "intermittent" links are very underdeveloped. Moreover, if the probabilities of long outages is too high, one would need a lot of memory for the FEC which becomes difficult to do in real-time processing (remember we need to process at >100Gb/s).