  We demonstrate the application of recent advances in statistical mechanics to
a problem in telecommunication engineering: the assessment of the quality of a
communication channel in terms of rare and extreme events. In particular, we
discuss non-Markovian models for telecommunication traffic in continuous time
and deploy the "cloning" procedure of non-equilibrium statistical mechanics to
efficiently compute their effective bandwidths. The cloning method allows us to
evaluate the performance of a traffic protocol even in the absence of
analytical results, which are often hard to obtain when the dynamics are
non-Markovian.
