David, Matthew and Daniel, <br><br>While I agree that TCP flow control is good and all, I worry a bit about<br>the TCP high-horse and the many newbies who misunderstand it. Without<br>implicating anyone, it's worth pointing out that TCP is not sacrosanct, it
<br>does not provide immunity from congestion, and it does not guarantee<br> fair bandwidth sharing at the host level. <br><br>I can create hundreds of TCP (or TCP-like) flows in parallel, easily consume more<br>than my fair share of bandwidth, and easily create congestion at the routers by
<br>closing and creating TCP connections (slow start, anyone?). Many p2p apps do<br> exactly that: open many connections to many other hosts.<br><br>In fact, I'm cranky at the moment because some idiot's p2p download is consuming
<br> all the bandwidth at my current wireless hotspot. Maybe what we need is to extend the TCP<br>ideas from the flow level to the host-level (and either embed them deep into the OS <br>or enforce them via traffic shaping).
<br><br>That said, it's better to use a protocol with built-in congestion control than without, and <br> it's better to adopt TCP's flow control than either nothing or something untested at large.<br><br>Bob.<br><br>