If you have bash, you can even partially get by without netcat as well. Bash has the wonderful "fake" devicenodes, /dev/tcp/host/port and /dev/udp/host/port.
If your system is running busybox you usually won't have full fat bash.
One thing that annoys me is how people will crack a quad core 1.6Ghz smartphone with 64Gb of storage and then install busybox to save those 50Mb over a regular shell environment that won't embarrass itself on every shell script or configure script.
One thing that annoys me is how people will crack a quad core 1.6Ghz smartphone with 64Gb of storage and then install busybox to save those 50Mb over a regular shell environment that won't embarrass itself on every shell script or configure script.