It seems more likely that the server you're connecting to is not actually sending the data until a carriage return is issued there. In other words, no matter how your client tries to read the data, it can only get anything if the server has actually written a packet to the socket. Depending on how the socket is being used in the server, the data may be buffered and may not actually be written to the underlying socket until a carriage return is issued.

Can you post some example server code?