Comment by tines

> The only possible caveat is that you might need some sort of keep alive [1] to detect if the connection has severed

You need this in the real world, but not with the hypothetical "infinite bandwidth perfect connection" of the problem statement. Also you'd need a keepalive/heartbeat with the author's original proposal if we want to allow real-world exigencies to start creeping in (suppose the server is very busy serving other requests and doesn't get to yours for a while), so it's not specific to the alternative I proposed.