the buffer is fully saturated. Once this happens, TCP may even decide that the path of the connection has changed, and again go into the more aggressive search for a new operating point.

Packets are queued within a network buffer before being transmitted; in problematic situations, packets are dropped only if the buffer is full. On older routers, buffers were fairly small, so they filled quickly, and therefore packets began to drop shortly after the link became saturated, so the TCP protocol could adjust, and the issue would not become