[mikeash]

Back around 2006, I had a RAZR that I figured out how to use to tether my computer onto Verizon’s 1xRTT service. I’m not sure which part of the system was to blame, but something had massive buffers and a strong aversion to dropping packets. If the connection got saturated I could easily see ping times of two minutes or more.

[supertrope]

To deal with the lossy RF environment, there are re-transmits at the PHY layer. Effectively creating a TCP on top of TCP situation.