Yes, and if a link is saturated, there should be packet drops, which TCP senses, then automatically throttles back to reduce the required bandwidth and avoid saturation. But what is happening, is that these huge buffers are holding packets that would otherwise be dropped, and so TCP doesn't get the feedback it needs to detect saturation. So it continues transmitting at full speed, believing it has uncongested pipes, which in turn continues to fill the buffers, and so on.

Because of the buffers, most of these packets are eventually getting through, but maybe in seconds instead of tens or low hundreds of milliseconds. Thus you're getting huge latency.

Jitter is caused by the buffers eventually filling or TCP timing out (registering packet loss), dropping the rate for a little bit, the buffers draining, then TCP upping the rate again as the buffers refill, hiding the saturation, until they're full again. Rinse and repeat.

It's related to the "bloat" of buffering (due to the increasing affordability of RAM and the "more of a good thing must be better than a little of a good thing - QED" mindset) because, if the size of the buffer is kept below a certain point related to the pipe bandwidth and number of traffic streams, it tends to act just as a temporary "buffer" against spikes in the traffic (the intention of buffering), and can't cause the scenario above, having insufficient capacity to overload the bandwidth just from buffer contents alone. Above this threshold, the latency issues and back-and-forth thrashing noted above occurs. The bigger the buffers, the worse the effect.

And it's not just a "well, keep your traffic below x mbit if you're on ADSL2" issue, because it happens anywhere a high capacity pipe interfaces with a low capacity or otherwise congested (of any capacity) pipe. This might be your ISP's backbone which is getting hit by several thousand people downloading the latest WOW patch simultaneously, causing your 300kbps Skype call to go to hell through latency and jitter. If the ISP's equipment had smaller buffers, the servers would be throttling back as packet loss occurred. You'd probably still be losing packets, but they'd be detected and re-transmitted pretty quickly and you possibly wouldn't notice the latency or have jitter.

So, no, what you get with appropriate buffers is your TCP connection moderating itself to the appropriate link capacity and availability, and latency remaining approximately the same (relative to what you're seeing in bufferbloat, but worse than an uncongested link, obviously).

With bufferbloat, your bandwidth appears to remain about the same, but your latency balloons massively and you get jitter effects as above.

Why do you assume it was a 'he'? There are plenty of women who would be happy to look at other females; and unfortunately a goodly number of people who don't really care about gender but get off on the power trip and humiliation.

What makes you think Windows 7 would run on the hardware involved? It's not some lightweight OS, regardles of the hype. It's just less sucky than Vista is/was and has similar hardware requirements (being basically Vista 1.5). I suppose that when they stop beating you with the steel pipe filled with lead and start beating you with just the steel pipe instead, you've got the tendency to say "Oh, that feels so much better".

I think being forced to provide a free copy of Win XP would be somewhat ironic given it's likely there was some motive as well to boost Vista ship numbers as well as placate the hardware makers. Of course, since those PCs have been unable to function properly since they were purchased (the whole point of the suit) it would not seem unreasonable that full support for XP be mandated for an equal period :-)