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I'd imagine TCP, as a protocol starts to fall over with moon-to-earth latencies.

Or would it? Perhaps simply increasing the retransmission timer would give us interplanetary internet. I wonder.






Moon to earth should be workable enough...average speed of light roundtrip will be about 2400ms.


Bandwidth delay product tends to limit throughput at such high latencies, though.


TCP uses RTT time to try to guess network congestion. Having worked on software that almost always had satellite hops, it sucks on long links. Primarily what you notice is that you get limited bandwidth because the TCP stack is throttling to prevent congestion. Not sure what RTT is to the moon and back but you would want to use something like TCP Hybla that does network congestion control a different way.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCP_congestion-avoidance_algori...


> interplanetary internet

Winternet!




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