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Many real-time applications can tolerate some packet loss, and if packets arrive out-of-order there's no benefit to re-sending them. I'm thinking of real-time games and VoIP, for example. TCP is a bad fit for these use cases. The only thing that works across nearly all routers is UDP.

I'd be more interested in making UDP more secure (and learning more about best practices) than to "avoid using UDP as a transport when possible".

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I think they meant, avoid using over the internet.

I mean using these things over the Internet. People play games over the Internet and use VoIP over the Internet. I think these are great technologies, and I don't want to cripple them by forcing them onto TCP.

True, i guess the author is thinking of over saturating a link and forgetting there are a class of problems that are fine with packet loss. Lots of networking SMEs live in complete fear of multicast on a LAN

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