Comment Re:What the FEC? (Score 1) 357
No, network coding is strictly better than multipath routing, which is simply simultaneous transmission along multiple routes. Multipath routing still looks at information networks as commodity flow networks. Please see the butterfly network example in the network coding article again in Wikipedia to understand why information flow networks are different and allow for higher capacities and pure routing cannot achieve this. Hope you will appreciate the counter-intuition.
The paper is not a breakthrough in terms of the concept itself, which has been around for quite a while. And the concept is truly remarkable -- as much as if 2 + 1 = 4 (which is essentially the case in the butterfly network). But practical coding schemes (in terms of computational complexity) and implementations are still works in progress.