A continuous connection is actually desirable on mobile networks to save battery; your phone can turn the radio on to a power saving mode if you use a single TCP connection and no traffic is being sent and only wake it up again when it gets a paging message alerting it that there is new data to be sent down over the TCP connection. However, if you use something that requires multiple connections (eg. to poll and see if new data is available), you will have to put the radio into full power mode every time you poll to check if there's new data.