[stormbrew]

Boy, it was dumb of them to put stream in the name (Stream Control Transmission Protocol) if it wasn't capable of acting in a streaming manner.

Oh wait, SCTP can act in an ordered-with-congestion-control mode (aka stream-oriented), and the userland interface to it (the most basic form of which is just plain old Berkeley sockets) does in fact implement packet assembly (of course, no matter what, if you want packets bigger than the MTU something's gonna have to disassemble and reassemble them on some level of the stack anyways).

Not to say that SCTP is a practical solution given the glacial pace of acceptance of any new network protocol at its level, but let's not start spreading FUD about its capabilities.

[bigbango]

Yes, network protocols like IPv6 have a glacial deployment speed. Because all the network equipment have to support it.

But it isn't so for transport protocols like SCTP. Only the endpoints using it need to support it. So a transport protocol that provides a real benefit could be deployed relatively quickly.