Always Thinking: Going from Wired to Unwired

Always Thinking: Going from Wired to Unwired: "We made a number of assumptions in the Messenger protocol based on the above, assumptions that have proven ill-advised. The most basic one is the one-to-one correspondence between user session and TCP/IP connection. Wireless networked devices – and I would include not just PCs but modern mobile phones that have GPRS or comparable packet-switched networking support – are requiring us to redesign our protocols to handle high-speed connections that are far more tenuous than the ones we originally designed for. Now we talk a lot about improving “session resiliency”, the notion that a user session in Messenger should be far more tolerant of state changes in the underlying network connectivity. Because it affects not just you but the people with whom you communicate, this change is fairly pervasive in the system, from the client UI all the way down to the lowest-level protocol goo on the client and server."