If part of the message is lost, the receiver can solve the equation to derive the missing data. The process of solving the equations is simple and linear, meaning it doesn't require much processing on behalf of the router/smartphone/laptop. In testing, the coded TCP resulted in some dramatic improvements. MIT found that campus WiFi (2% packet loss) jumped from 1Mbps to 16Mbps. On a fast-moving train (5% packet loss), the connection speed jumped from 0.5Mbps to 13.5Mbps. Moving forward, coded TCP is expected to have huge repercussions on the performance of LTE and WiFi networks — and the technology has already been commercially licensed to several hardware makers.

1. A lost packet means a collision or network congestion, therefore the proper response to a lost packet notification is to slow down the transmit rate

2. When packet #2 is lost, even though the client has perfectly cromulent copies of packets 3-1094932, they must *all* be thrown away and the entire stream is restarted. There is no facility to go back and re transmit just the missing packet - the ACK can't say "I got packets 1,3-1094932, please just re-send #2".

This new scheme reconstructs packet #2 in this scenario by using the FEC data in the other packets. This allows the link to tolerate a certain % of packet loss without requiring any re-transmits, thus all those packets from 3 upwards don't have to be re transmitted. It also greatly reduces latency as reconstructing packet #2 is faster (due to the computationally efficient FEC algorithm) than requesting a re transmit. This also prevents the TCP link from scaling back its transmit rate, further improving performance.