I’m sitting here in a small closed room, deep in a building with poor reception. I click a link to open up a picture from the internet, and then it takes several minutes for the picture to load. If I had been outside, with better reception, the picture loads in under a second. So I am assuming the cell tower is continuously sending the information to my phone. Does the network read the amount of data sent by the tower or does it only count what my phone decrypts? Follow up question: if it only counts what my phone picks up, then wouldn’t that be exploitable?
In: Technology
TCP is a type of connection that enforces data delivery and is typically used by any software that needs to be sure it receives all the data, such as web browsers.
Vaguely speaking it goes something like this:
– Your phone says “Hey I need to access this web resource.”
– The tower says “Sure, I’m going to start sending some data now please acknowledge”
– Your phone didn’t receive that, so it asks again until it gets a response or it takes too long and times out
– Assuming the above is completed successfully, your phone sends an acknowledgement and the tower sends back “here’s a little bit of data…..did you get that?”
– Your phone didn’t receive the data so it doesn’t even know the tower tried to send anything….the tower waits a certain amount of time and thinks “Hmmm…I haven’t heard back yet…let me send it again” and sends the same information again.
– This time your phone receives the data and sends back “Hey yeah I got that, can you send the next bit of data?”
This pretty much goes back and forth until you either receive all the data, or the communication takes too long and closes the TCP connection.
It’s pretty much a back and forth of your phone asking for the next packet in a sequence and waiting until that comes back before asking for the next one. Things are generally re-broadcasted as necessary to continue the communication until it takes too long to respond and drops the connection, or the communication completes.
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