Developed in 1996, ECIP originaly was "Error Correction Internet Protocol" and to our knowledge was the first use of FEC "Foward Error correction" on the Internet.

The goal of ECIP is to provide a reliable point-to-point connection over UDP, making the chaotic Internet backbone a clean and reliable as a directly connected leased line. It design is optimized for constant bandwidth streams, but NOT FILE TRANSFERS. It's designed for Low Latency for realtime control, or streamming.

To provice a QOS (Quality of service) type of data transmission without using RSVP or anything internal to the network and routers, everything is designed to operate external to the routers and only assumes packets can be send over a link with variable delays from 0 to infinity with a certain statistical curve. Packets arriving after a given delay are considered lost or at least too late to used by the data consumer such as a video decompression engine.

Current ECIP implementations are designed for Live Realtime applications such as VOIP, video confrencing, Live Video Streaming and was originaly developed for use with Livecam streaming and Xing Technololgy's Streamworks.
It reduces or eliminates the need for Buffering in these types of application.

ECIP is suitable for many other applications such as Satellite and Terrestrial Broadcast, WiFi 802.11 and other packet based media where packet loss is a problem.