TCP was designed to assume that packet loss was due to contention... so if you have random or other non-contention-related packet loss, your sessions will slow

TCP was designed to assume that packet loss was due to contention... so if you have random or other non-contention-related packet loss, your sessions will slow to a crawl. In this case multiplexing might make things worse than separate sessions... but you're probably just as screwed either way. What you really need to do is just get them to fix the random packet loss problem you probably have.