A system and method are provided for establishing multiple parallel connections between a client and a server on a single server port. Data may be transferred on the multiple parallel connections between the server and the client through an opening in a network firewall that corresponds to the single server port. A control process may accept N connection requests from a client then transfer each accepted connection to a relay process that manages that connection. Each relay process may relay data between the server and the client via the single server port. A single collective data transfer may be executed on the N parallel connections, thereby increasing throughput and data transfer rates. If the data transfer rate is primarily limited by network latency, using N parallel connections provides the advantage of increasing the data transfer rate by approximately a factor of N.