Thus spake "Iljitsch van Beijnum" <iljitsch@muada.com>
But how is packet reordering on two parallell gigabit interfaces ever going to translate into reordered packets for individual streams?
Think of a large FTP between two well-connected machines. Such flows tend to generate periodic clumps of packets; split one of these clumps across two pipes and the clump will arrive out of order at the other end. The resulting mess will create a clump of retransmissions, then another bigger clump of new data, ...
Packets for streams that are subject to header compression or for voice over IP or even Mbone are nearly always transmitted at relatively large intervals, so they can't travel down parallell paths simultaneously.
RTP reordering isn't a problem in my experience, probably since RTP has an inherent resequencing mechanism. The problem with RTP is that if the packets don't follow a deterministic path, the header compression scheme is severely trashed. Also, non-deterministic paths tend to increase jitter, requiring more bufferring at endpoints. S