[kevin_nisbet]

One thing I wish they had talked about, was about applying Random Early Detection (RED) to this problem. It seems to be, that RED, while an older technique, was created for exactly this purpose, and is supported in every IP router I've ever worked with. Perhaps there are challenges applying RED here, but I would suspect that if introduced it would also have considerable improvements to the internet performance for those islands.

Now, the solution presented, could be superior to RED, but based on what they've shown, I'm not entirely convinced. It is an intriguing solution though.

Also, an important takeaway they presented, that translates to other software tasks, is that increasing the buffer often makes the situation worse. One thing you can look into, is the research currently underway into buffer bloat, and the suspected impacts it is believed to be having on consumer internet service. My understanding is it appears to be caused by this exact phenomenon, where engineers from equipment manufactures and telecom operators reacted to the problem by drastically increasing buffer sizes.

*Please be aware, I work for a large telecom operator in Canada, but the views are my own and do not reflect any position of my employer.

[wtallis]

There are challenges to deploying RED anywhere. That's why we now have a new generation of queue management strategies stemming from CoDel. Still, even with the best queue management there's obviously a benefit to using extra forward error correction like this to further reduce packet drops if the latency is high enough, but I'm not sure it is in this case.