If you live in an area where your Internet connection suffers from lost packets or your mobile phone sounds horrible and has trouble streaming data, you have hope. A new breakthrough in how the Internet and digital transmissions handle lost packets may improve your life.
This breakthrough is all about how lost packets are handled. Think of the Internet as a pneumatic tube, like at some banks’ drive through services. Those with the clear tubes and cylindrical carriers you put your check and ID in to send to the teller and they return cash to you in them. Internet packets are like the carriers. But think of all the tubes coming from the drive ups you use into a single tube. If your carrier bumps into another it jams in the tube. In the digital world it sort of magically returns to the starting point.
A traffic controller in your network card and system handles those collisions. It uses a mathematical algorithm to decide when to send the packet/carrier on its way again. The idea is to prevent packets from various computers and devices from being sent at the same time. It is inefficient and slows things down.
