Google's Experimental QUIC Transport Protocol Is Showing Promise

Last year Google announced QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connections) as a stream multiplexing protocol running on a new flavor of TLS over UDP rather than TCP. Google's been expanding their testing of QUIC internally and the results are showing great results.

Google's QUIC offers good security comparable to TLS, is very fast, it's designed to reduce packet loss, provides packet error correction, and has other benefits over TCP+TLS. In a blog post on Friday, Google shared that QUIC is doing great in latency-sensitive services and for users in Google's already well-optimized Search, there's about a 3% improvement in the mean page load time with QUIC.

Google plans to continue expanding its usage of QUIC internally and eventually to make it the default means of transform from Google clients to Google servers. Google will propose QUIC to the IETF as an Internet standard, but there's still some work to do before that happens.

Those wishing to learn more about QUIC can stop by the Chromium blog for the rest of the new details.