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Forward error correction (FEC) is widely used for the improvement of the quality of noisy transmission media as wireless links. This improvement is of importance for a transport protocol as TCP which uses the loss of packets as an indication of network congestion. FEC shields TCP from losses not caused by congestion and helps it to improve its throughput but on the other hand it consumes a part of the available bandwidth that could be used by TCP. In this paper we study in detail this bandwidth tradeoff between TCP and FEC. By analysis and simulations we show how TCP performance varies as a function of the amount of FEC.