Actually, I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s the case. While it&#x27;s true that the theoretical maximum speed of an individual connection would decrease rapidly as packet loss increases, the aggregate data rate of the traffic going through a single network element would not necessarily be affected all that much.<p>It&#x27;s totally routine to see much higher network wide packet loss rates higher than 1%. The most I can remember was &gt;15% sustained for weeks, for a few Gbps of real life traffic in a mobile network. (&quot;Real life&quot; as in hundreds of thousands of normal users, with the traffic coming directly from whatever servers they were actually accessing).