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I realized afterwards that what I want isn't all FEC left to higher levels, but the retransmission logic. It is absolutely necessary to detect packet corruption at the link-layer, for the MAC address, if nothing else. But it is not necessary to infinitely re-transmit all data. There are very few protocols that gracefully handle an RTT of over 60s, so buffering data for more than a few seconds is bonkers.

I do also think that exposing some knobs for the quantity of FEC to apply to a higher level might make sense; some packets are 100% fine to drop, others are very much not. Standards trying to do this exist, but don't seem to be widely supported.



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