What is the impact of packet loss on business-critical applications in SD-WAN?

• A. Packet loss is beneficial
• B. Packet loss degrades performance and user experience; SD-WAN mitigates by multi-path redundancy, adaptive QoS, and error concealment where applicable
• C. Packet loss has no impact
• D. Packet loss only affects streaming video

Answer: (B)

Packet loss hurts performance and user experience for business-critical applications, and SD-WAN is designed to lessen that impact. When packets are dropped, real-time and interactive apps suffer: voice calls become choppy, video conferencing jitters, and business software experiences delays or incomplete data transmissions. SD-WAN mitigates this in several ways. It can send traffic over multiple links at once or quickly switch traffic away from a congested path to healthier ones (multi-path redundancy and fast path selection), so a single bad link doesn’t drag down the whole application. It uses adaptive quality of service to prioritize critical traffic—giving, for example, VoIP and essential SaaS traffic higher priority and bandwidth while less time-sensitive data waits. For media or applications that can tolerate some loss, error concealment or forward error correction may help keep the experience smooth. In short, SD-WAN doesn’t remove packet loss, but it reduces its effect on important applications by rerouting, prioritizing, and sometimes masking lost data.

The other options aren’t accurate because packet loss is not beneficial, it does not have no impact, and it isn’t confined only to streaming video—loss can degrade many types of business-critical apps.