Can’t believe everything you read

Two years ago, I wrote about open source saying it wasn’t always the answer. I was recently reminded of this when I was searching for a good networking stack for use in an application. While we have a killer (in my opinion) stack that I enjoy using at work in a bunch of our applications, it isn’t open source and therefore I can’t use it. I looked at a bunch of iOS networking stacks and found some too complex, some no longer supported, and some that were good candidates.

After reading the explanation of each one carefully, I came to the conclusion, that one of them completely made up at least part of his explanation on why his stack was better than the rest. The author claimed that the maximum number of simultaneous TCP connections over a 3G connection was 2. This I find incredibly hard to believe. Palm OS had a limit of 1 connection (I believe) and that was eons ago. Could 3G be so bad that we only doubled this? Could/would 3G carriers enforce this? I was unable to find any material supporting what the author said.

I’ve been working with cellular data for over 15 years and have never heard of this kind of limit on any device; there are, of course, bottlenecks when you try to open too many connections and certain OSes have limits to the number of connections.

While the networking stack looked interesting, I immediately stopped reading and completely discounted it. The author’s story sounded compelling, but as far as I can tell is a complete work of fiction.

I did end up using a very simple network stack that a colleague had developed on his own time; it doesn’t do everything I’d like, but it meets my immediate needs.

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