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traveling across a computer network or another type of
telecommunications network typically comes in packets. Packets
are smaller, "bite-sized" pieces of a larger chunk of
information. Although telecommunication technology is generally
reliable and seamless from the end-user's point of view, that is
only because the computer does the dirty work. It constantly
sifts through the packets, looking for fraudulent and corrupt
data, discarding it when found. A burst error is a string of
corrupt data, measured as the length between — and including —
the first and last error signals. For example, imagine sending a
packet containing all of the letters of the alphabet, A through
Z. If the recipient's computer "opens" the packet and finds that
the first letter in the sequence is "Q" and the last letter in
the sequence is "R," that is a burst error. The "burst" of data
in the packet is corrupt. Although in the example the first and
last letters are defined as