We show that a block interleaved maximum distance separable (MDS) code
offers near-optimal burst erasure protection, in the sense that no other
scheme of equal total transmission length and code rate could improve
the guaranteed-correctible burst erasure length by more than one symbol.
The optimality does not depend on the length of the code, i.e., a short
MDS code block interleaved to a given length would perform as well as a
longer MDS code of the same overall length.  As a result, this approach
offers lower decoding complexity with better burst erasure protection
compared to other recent designs for the burst erasure channel (e.g.,
low-density parity-check codes).  A limitation of the design is its lack
of robustness to channels that have impairments other than burst
erasures (e.g., additive white Gaussian noise), making its application
best suited for correcting data erasures in layers above the physical
layer.