Software developer pilot fish works from home, which means he depends heavily on the VPN connection to his home office.

“I was having issues with my DSL, so I rebooted the modem,” says fish. “No change, so I fired up Wireshark and saw the problem: tons of TCP timeouts, retries, duplicate ACKS, etc.

“I called the phone company for support, and after spending several minutes responding to the automated answering robot I spoke with a clueless support technician and explained the problem.

“He told me my problem was that I shouldn’t be using TCP — instead, I should use my web browser.

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