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The window it should be

The situation

A college transfers a nightly dataset to a partner institution across the country. The link is 100 Mbps end to end and measured round trip time is 80 ms. A single TCP transfer sustains only 6.5 Mbps.

Running eight transfers in parallel gets close to 100 Mbps in total, which rules out a hardware bottleneck: the path can carry the traffic.

Packet capture shows almost no retransmission, and the receiver advertises a window of 64 KiB and never more.

For reference, 64 KiB delivered once per 80 ms round trip is 65,536 × 8 ÷ 0.08 = 6.55 Mbps, which is what the transfer achieves.

How much data must be in flight to keep a 100 Mbps link with an 80 ms round trip fully busy?