Without Google optical fiber, you can use its QUIC protocol to increase network speed.

Without Google optical fiber, you can use its QUIC protocol to increase network speed.

Google said that its self-developed QUIC network protocol can speed up Web browsing. Google is planning to propose suggestions to the IETF standard organization to make QUIC a next-generation Internet protocol.

What is QUIC?

After SPDY was successfully used as the foundation of the HTTP/2 standard, Google began to work quietly on the QUIC protocol since 2013. SPDY is a TCP-based application layer protocol developed by Google to minimize network latency, improve network speed, and optimize user experience. SPDY is not a protocol used to replace HTTP, but an enhancement of HTTP.

Like SPDY, QUIC requires faster Web application response by reducing the network round-trip time (RTT), that is, reducing the time needed to establish a connection with the server.

What is the purpose?

The results of earlier experiments were quite encouraging. On a highly optimized website like Google Search, we can still see that the average page loading time is reduced by 3%, although the difference is not very huge, but you can't underestimate it.

The impact of QUIC on poor or slow Internet connections has been significantly improved, for example, mobile networks. Google said that after QUIC is used to replace TCP/TLS, the loading time of Google Search pages on the Mobile End is reduced by one second, while that of YouTube videos is reduced by 30%.

What is the principle?

Standard methods are used for Secure Web browsing, usually involving TCP + TLS. Simply put, before a browser can request a real web page, it takes two to three rounds to establish a secure connection with the server. After QUIC is used, if the client has visited a given server before, it can send data without any network round-trip time, which makes the webpage loading faster.

By using the QUIC method on the Internet UDP protocol, this is achieved by replacing the commonly used TCP protocol. This avoids the possible loss of TCP-connected data packets.

So what if there is no communication before? In this case, QUIC allows the connection time to reach the same level as the TCP connection, while providing TLS + TCP security.

It can be seen that, compared with TCP connections, QUIC plays a more significant role in reducing the latency of non-first access. The initial connection is three times faster than TLS, and each subsequent connection is faster. QUIC also provides the same security as TLS + TCP.

Google has added QUIC protocol support in the latest version of Chrome browser and included this protocol in some of its online services, in this way, the actual performance of the Protocol can be tested in a large scale.