In June 2013, Google announced its experimental project Quic, short for Quick UDP Internet Connections, which aimed to speed up web connections.
The company today said it has managed to boost traffic on its servers using Quick UDP Internet Connections, and the results are very encouraging.
Instead of using the Internet protocols TCP and TLS, Quic can reduce page load time and buffering because it requires fewer conversations between clients and the server.
What's the secret?
The new protocol establishes the lowest latency connection, especially for devices connecting to a specific web server or service that they have previously connected to, Google says:
[alert variation=”alert-info”]The usual way to do secure web browsing was to pass all communications over TCP + TLS, which requires 2 to 3 message trips to and from a server to establish a secure connection before the browser requests the actual web page.
The new protocol is designed so that when a client has talked to a particular server at least once before, it can start sending data without round trips, which makes web pages load much faster.
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Google reports that about 50% of all requests from Chrome to Google servers are served with Quic, resulting in faster loading of search results.
Data loss from the new protocol is reportedly much less than that of the TCP protocol: Google notes that YouTube users report 30% less rebuffering when streaming video and there are connection interruptions.
The company plans to propose that Quick UDP Internet Connectionsan official web standard in the future, as it continues its experiment, making additional improvements.
