Re: Concensus Call on Urgent Pointer.

[Vern Paxson <vern@ee.lbl.gov>]

> In any case, it isn't really the configuration that is important but 
> the packet drop rate due to either corruption (very low rates should be 
> assumed - at least 10E-9 to 10E-12)

Unfortunately, in practice you don't get nearly such low corruption rates:

	Traces of Internet packets over the last two years show that
	1 in 30,000 packets fails the TCP checksum, even on links where
	link-level CRCs should catch all but 1 in 4 billion errors.

(from the abstract of
 http://www.acm.org/sigcomm/sigcomm2000/conf/abstract/9-1.htm)

The problem is that end-to-end transmission involves a large chain of
systems, and their composite failure rate is much worse than their
individual failure rate.

		Vern