Pointless Pontification: since TCP was designed to route around failure, multi-connection TCP sounds to me like an adaptation of technology to the "demands of business." What I mean is network operators seem to want to centralize their networks to reduce costs instead of distributing them to make them robust, thus the technologists are attempting to work around this "failure."
In this case, iOS is connecting to Siri server using both 4G and WiFi. They apparently go through different routers. This helps improve reliability when the device is at border of a WiFi coverage and is switching between 4G and WiFi back-and-forth. Using two path simultaneously would allow Siri to switch to the other route when one of them is showing significant packet loss.
One of three things can happen:
- Both endpoints support MPTCP and announce it through the MPTCP option : MPTCP will be used. Subflows will be set-up if possible (i.e. if additional addresses are present on at least one of the endpoint)
- One of the endpoints (say an ios7 device) supports it, but the other (say a webserver) doesn't : the server will ignore the MPTCP option (which it doesn't understand) and a normal, single path TCP connection will be used.
- None of the endpoints support it, thus no MPTCP option will be sent, normal TCP will be used.