Throughput was rejected as a factor. It also encourages ISPs to have plenty of capacity and not to drop packets. ISPs can cheat by favoring ICMP packets. Introduction Internet access is becoming more and more critical to more and more organizations and individuals. Actual results are listed after that.
Performance can mean many things.
The time to transfer a file is one measure, while the responsiveness of an interactive remote login session is another. The time to call up a Web page is still another. If an ISP drops many packets, it will clearly take longer to transmit data or do remote operations because packets need to be retransmitted. Network delay is the time it takes for packets to go through a network. Many applications simply idle while waiting for DNS information.