[allanjude]

I think the implication is: TCP kind of assumed you will either keep transmitting, or close the connection.

The many video-streaming type workloads, the connection will go idle, for seconds or even minutes at a time. If the loss is at the tail end of some activity, before a period of idle, the recovery takes a lot longer than it would if there are further activity on the connection.

[bogomipz]

Ah OK thanks that makes sense now. They did actually use the word "furthest" in the sentence previous to the one I quoted which also makes sense tin the context. Cheers.