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The current version of android supports multiple APNs but does not support multiple active PDP contexts. Why had Android choose not to go down this route? And is it planned in future releases of the android platform?

The background to my question is that my application needs to communicate over a special APN. But when I do this I lose connectivity for all other running connected applications on my device.

Does anyone have a cleaner approach to solving this issue?

Brian Tompsett - 汤莱恩
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Shane Murphy
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2 Answers2

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My suggestion, why Android does not support multiple active PDP contexts is that Android is based on *nix, and networking is based on classic sockets. If take looks sockets API, there's no PDP contexts.

Solving the issue.

At first one may ask himself: why do he need to send data through special APN. Special APN usually is used to connect to "Private Garden" networks, usually, corporate LAN. Other words, APN is kind of VPN, but in terms of GSM technology. Why one like to use VPN? In many cases, to protect data while transferring.

The APN or VPN is not the only solution for such purposes. You can use SSL: it will ensure that data is encrypted and remote host is not faked. And when using HTTP over SSL, ability to delivery data is much higher because access to the Internet from many networks is provided by proxy server.

iosh
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Using multiple PDP-context cannot be compared simply to VPN. A PDP context can also be use to request better QoS from the network in the case of a voice application for example.

As far as I know, this is still not supported by Android nor by IOS, except when it comes to VoLTE and MMS where both those services run natively on distinct APNs.

Fred
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