Faucet is part of "netpipes", which is available for most Unixoid operating systems. I guess it was inspiration to build "netcat". But netcat was a absolute terrible hack of a program, so "socat" (socket-cat?) was born.
In case you need the functionality of bash's /dev/tcp [1] and you are pondering to install netcat or netpipes, do yourself a favor and just go for socat, it's insanely more powerful, read the manpage, read the examples!