Completion rates measure the useful transmission of complete binary files across newsgroups.
Newsgroups function by a large network of servers which regularly synchronize posts with each other. Each time a post is transferred between news servers there is a chance that it will be dropped. There are many possible causes for a dropped post, such as high network traffic and dropped packets. If even a single post is dropped from a large file then the entire file will become useless. To combat this, par files were created.
Many ISP News Servers do not have a link into the Internet backbone of the internal news network. They often suffer from resulting low completion rates.
Famous quotes containing the word rate:
“If you could choose your parents,... we would rather have a mother who felt a sense of guilt—at any rate who felt responsible, and felt that if things went wrong it was probably her fault—we’d rather have that than a mother who immediately turned to an outside thing to explain everything, and said it was due to the thunderstorm last night or some quite outside phenomenon and didn’t take responsibility for anything.”
—D.W. Winnicott (20th century)