A Little-Heralded New iOS 7 Feature: Multipath TCP

Olivier Bonaventure writes "Besides changes in UI, multitasking and other features that the press discusses, iOS7 also includes support for Multipath TCP. Multipath TCP is a major extension to TCP that is able to use different interfaces for the same connection. Until now, Multipath TCP has been mainly used by researchers with a modified Linux kernel. iOS7 changes that, with millions of Multipath-TCP enabled devices that can switch from 3G to WiFi without losing existing TCP connections. This is not yet the case on iOS7, which currently seems to only enable it for SIRI, but other use cases will likely appear in the future."

Re:You're Not Making Sense

[Anonymous Coward]

As you said yourself, both ends needs to be MTCP aware. Apple controling its servers can implement/activate on the ones hosting SIRI.
But for Safari to show MTCP behavior, it means that the webserver should also support MTCP and it seems none do.

An odd way to speed up Siri

[s.o.terica]

I can understand that Apple wants to speed up Siri (the latency on Siri can be horrible, even over a fast WiFi connection), but why do it this way rather than enabling simultaneous client-side speech recognition a la Google Now (even in the Google app on iOS)?

Google's method allows the speech recognition process to appear instantaneous. On a Nexus 4, Google Now recognizes speech almost as fast as you can speak.

Siri on the other hand can often take several seconds to understand a request, even under iOS 7. To me, this more than anything else is what diminishes the user experience.

Re:closed source triumphs again

[nine-times]

Maybe because:

This is not yet the case on iOS7, which currently seems to only enable it for SIRI

If it's just for Siri, then at this point, it's still a highly technical feature that the user won't be able to see obvious benefits from. Apple generally won't present technical features in their Keynote unless they can explain how users will benefit.

Re:Good idea, but ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod parent up. Whoever wrote the summary does not understand how TCP works. You can't just switch client IP at random between packets. TCP connections are end-to-end. This is why this is an *extension* and is not really used anyway.

Heck, most semi-safe protocols (eg. game interactive content) have some sort of connection tracking that involves client's IP address to prevent interference and/or hijacking. Multipath wouldn't work there either.

Re:Siri: Bad use case?

[Tim12s]

But it is a great mass-market testcase.