TCP is in fact pretty shitty over "bad links". Standard TCP congestion control algorithms are designed to assume that packet loss indicates congestion; not lin

TCP is in fact pretty shitty over "bad links". Standard TCP congestion control algorithms are designed to assume that packet loss indicates congestion; not link degradation. This results in actual "bad links" tricking TCP into thinking there's congestion... so it backs off (which doesn't fix the problem); backs off some more (which still doesn't fix the problem); etc.; resulting in terrible throughput in the face of packet loss. There are alternative congestion control algorithms that mitigate this somewhat; but the best solution (which AFAIK there is no widely-used standard for) is to use forward-error-correction. But since the Internet, for the most part, doesn't actually have "bad links", this is not generally necessary.