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But when you're transferring files, you usually want reliability. They could have used UDP and implemented reliability in the application, but would that have saved overhead? I don't think so.

EDIT: By the way, you source is about 802.11b. Very specific case, and also quite old.

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TCP sends data in-order but you don't need that for transferring a file. Hence you can do better than TCP.

http://udt.sourceforge.net/ is a solution using UDP but we decided that TCP with multiple flow was a better tradeoff for us (not to reinvent most of the window, congestion control, etc... of TCP)

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